UK boy dies after life support stopped at end of long legal battle

A London hospital on Saturday withdrew life support for 12-year-old British boy Archie Battersbee after his parents lost a long, emotive and divisive legal battle.

Archie’s mother, Hollie Dance, said her son passed away just over two hours after the artificial ventilation was stopped.

“Such a beautiful little boy. He fought right until the very end,” she told reporters, sobbing, outside the Royal London Hospital.

“I’m the proudest mum in the world,” Dance said, after spending the night at his bedside with other relatives.

One of them, Ella Carter, denounced Archie’s final moments as “barbaric”, however. She said that after his ventilation was switched off, “he went completely blue”.

“There is absolutely nothing dignified about watching a family member or a child suffocate,” she said.

Dance found Archie unconscious at home in April with signs he had placed a cord around his neck, possibly after taking part in an online asphyxiation challenge.

The hospital trust’s chief medical officer, Alistair Chesser, said in a statement that “Archie died after treatment was withdrawn in line with court rulings about his best interests”.

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Chesser thanked the medical staff who cared for Archie, saying they “provided high quality care with extraordinary compassion over several months in often trying and distressing circumstances”.

At the entrance to the hospital in east London, well-wishers left flowers and cards, and lit candles in the shape of the letter “A”.

“My boy is 12, the same age as Archie, and this just puts things in perspective,” Shelley Elias, 43, said after leaving her own offerings at the site earlier on Saturday.

“I did not know what to write because there are no words that will take the pain away,” she said.

A judge in June agreed with doctors that Archie was “brain-stem dead”, allowing life support to be discontinued, but the family fought through the courts to overturn that.

Arguing that Archie could benefit from treatment in Italy or Japan, they took their case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which this week declined to intervene.

The parents also lost a last-ditch legal bid to have Archie transferred to a hospice for his final hours.

“Reform must now come through Charlie’s Law so that no parents have to go through this.”