A 13-year-old boy, Harry Storey, has hanged himself after finding out through posts on a WhatsApp group chat that the girl he had a secret ‘crush’ on had started dating another boy.

The incident occurred in Oxfordshire, a county in South East England.

According to Daily Mail, the teenager’s friends thought he was joking when he commented to them on WhatsApp that he had thoughts about suicide after learning he had a love rival.

In a series of WhatsApp messages, Harry had found out his close friend who he had a ‘crush’ on had a boyfriend and he mentioned suicide but carried on the conversation normally afterwards, investigating officer Detective Sergeant Lou Heffernan-Glover confirmed.

His parent told Oxfordshire Coroner Darren Salter, on Tuesday, that Harry had watched a TV programme where a female star had hanged herself and he may have developed a glamorised view of what it might be like.

“We watched a programme where the female star had hanged herself but her friends rescued her. It made us wonder whether he had a sensationalised view of what might happen,” his father Andrew Storey said.

Harry was rushed by road ambulance from his home to a hospital on March 1 after he was discovered by his father and remained in the paediatric intensive care unit until his tragic death three days later.

Andrew said he walked into the house on March 1, after finishing work and saw Harry on the stairs out of the corner of his eye.

He said he had thought his son was standing on the stairs looking down at his phone before he realised what had happened.

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However, a police investigator told the inquest that, tragically, Harry did not intend to die when he hanged himself and probably did not realise how quickly he would lose consciousness.

The discovery of the schoolboy came as a ‘complete shock’ to his devastated family who never had any worries about him and regarded him as a regular, happy boy with no previous mental health issues.