A young girl was killed when she swung on a tree branch that should have been removed, an inquest heard.
Brooke Wiggins was seriously injured by a falling tree branch a few days before her 13th birthday on November 9 2024 in Banstead, Surrey.
South London Coroner’s Court heard that Surrey County Council was due to re-inspect the branch six months earlier but did not do so.
Acting on behalf of Brooke’s father, Lee Wiggins, Christian Weaver said that if an inspection had been carried out, any rope swing found in the tree would have to be removed, ‘as per policy’.
Brooke’s father told the inquest that his daughter was a ‘wonderful young woman’, ‘intelligent and very funny’.
Sign up to get all the latest stories
Start your day with information from Metro News Updates newsletter or get latest news warning when it happens.
She said: ‘I am sad because my baby girl has been taken from me.
‘He packed so much into his short life.
‘Just 12 years old, and now he’s gone forever.
“When I think about it, I ask myself, ‘why my darling Brooke?’
“If only people had done their jobs right… the only thing that had to be done and done right, Brooke would still be here,” Wiggins added.
A representative for Surrey County Council said expert evidence showed the inspection might not have produced a ‘materially different outcome’.
In a statement read by assistant coroner Ivor Collett on behalf of Brooke’s mother, Claire Etherington, she was described as a ‘beautiful, delightful, caring and affectionate girl’ who had ‘the most extraordinary way of lighting up every room she entered’.
‘He was always surrounded by people who loved him, and it’s easy to see why – he gave so much love back,’ his mother said.
Brooke loves dancing, art, singing, and taking photos.
She takes pride in expressing herself, and ‘never goes anywhere without wearing eyelashes’, she says.
‘She is a smart girl with so much potential.
“We will always wonder what he wanted to achieve in his life,” Ms Etherington said.
She added that she hopes knowing what happened to Brooke will bring “some sense of closure” and “understanding.”
Speaking at the start of the hearing, Collett said: ‘This has been a very sad inquest.
‘Of course, no inquest is pleasant, but this was horrific because it involved the death of a young child and there was no way out of that.
‘To the family, I sometimes sound a bit cold and distant… (but) I don’t take away one iota of the never-ending pain the family feels at the loss of their beloved daughter.’
The examination continues.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
