Mrs Deborah Rundle complained to the Press Complaints Commission that an approach by a reporter to her daughter after the death of her son raised a breach of clause 5 (intrusion into grief or shock) of the Editors' Code of Practice.
The complaint was upheld.
The complainant's son, Toby, had died at university on October 8, 2009, and there was speculation that he had taken his own life. Mrs Rundle complained that coverage of the incident in The Sunday Times was inaccurate and insensitive.
While the PCC investigation was ongoing, another reporter from the paper contacted the complainant's daughter through Facebook. She informed the reporter that the family did not wish to speak in view of the ongoing complaint. The reporter then asked about the details of the complaint, sending a copy of the article to the complainant's daughter so she could highlight what was wrong with it. This upset Mrs Rundle's daughter.
The managing editor apologised for this second approach, explaining that the reporter was a freelance and was unaware of the PCC complaint. However, he accepted that the reporter should not have continued questioning Mrs Rundle's daughter once the complaint had been mentioned. The reporter understood her error and apologised for it. Nothing from the correspondence would be used in any future article. Additionally, all section editors and deputies had been alerted to the complaint and told not to contact the family. The paper also offered to send a private letter of apology to the family.
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Adjudication It was regrettable that a communication failure at the newspaper resulted in a further approach being made to the family despite the fact that there was an outstanding complaint about the previous coverage. It would also have been sensible for the reporter not to have pursued the matter directly with Mrs Rundle's daughter once the complaint had been brought to her attention. The combination of these two factors led the commission to conclude that the handling of this approach was intrusive in breach of clause 5, and the complaint was upheld on this point.
A further complaint about an article headlined "'Harry Potter' student found hanged in his Oxford room", published in The Sunday Times on October 11, 2009, was not upheld.