ToRUTHCROUCH, 61, her son appeared to have a great life filled with
friends, family and love – but behind his smile was a broken young manINSPIRINGREAD
P
icking up her 13-year-old son
Declan from school, Ruth Crouch
watched as he emerged from
the building surrounded by
a group of teenage girls.
“They were talking to him, smiling,
laughing and touching his shaggy
brown hair,” Ruth recalls.
Good-looking, clever, funny and
popular, his future seemed bright.
Which makes it all the more tragic
when, just months later, Declan chose
to end his life.
“I’ll never understand,” she says.
Incredibly, from the rawest grief,
she became determined to spare
others her pain.
Declan wasn’t abused, bullied
or unpopular. The family home at
Machans Beach, a suburb of Cairns
in Far North Queensland, was always
filled with laughter.
Ruth split from Declan’s biological
father when he was just a toddler and
her daughter Grace, now 24 was six.A couple of years later she met Peter,
now 64 – he raised the children as
his own and they regarded him as
their father.
“We constantly joked around and
teased each other,” Ruth recalls.
“Declan loved music and reading,
he did well at school, played sports
and had lots of friends. He was a sweet,
affectionate and loving boy who’d sit
and talk with us for hours.”
When he was 11, Declan became
more subdued, losing interest in school
and some of his friends. At the time,
Grace was 15 and already on the teen
roller-coaster so Ruth assumed Declan
was just entering early puberty. But
as a social worker who’d worked with
children in the past, and whose job
involved assessing suicide risk in adult
clients, Ruth was concerned about
Declan’s mental health and sought
professional advice – only to be told
she was an “over-meddlesome mum”.
“I backed off,” Ruth says with regret.“Decided to let Declan be.”
Things continued as they had
but Ruth was reassured by Declan’s
ongoing popularity and enthusiastic
engagement with his family. However,
there were some troubling teen issues.
“We found out he’d been drinking
and smoked dope with some friends,”
Ruth says, before elaborating on the
serious lecture Declan was on the
receiving end of as a result.
Soon after, Ruth noticed Declan was
deleting his online search history so she
began closely supervising his internet use.
“He was grumpy about it but there
were no arguments,” she says.
On March 9, 2011, a month shy of
Declan’s 14th birthday, Ruth, who’d just
turned 55, dropped him off at school.
“There was nothing out of the
ordinary,” Ruth recalls.
Declan normally caught the bus
home and was back by 4pm, but
that day, when Peter arrived home at
4.30pm, Declan’s school uniform was
in the laundry and he was nowhere
to be found.
Ruth was worried, and by 7pm they
reported Declan missing to the police.
A huge search and investigation was
initiated. All the while, Ruth, Peter
and Grace were distraught.
“We assumed he’d run away, not that
he had any reason to,” Ruth says. “But
that was what his friends were saying
on Facebook.”
As weeks passed, Ruth never wavered
from the belief her son would returnher daughter Grace, now 24,wLITTLE
BOY LOST
Queensland
police and
SES, along
with family
and friends,
conducted
a wide search
for teenager
Declan, who
disappeared
in early
March 2011‘‘I can’t let grief