A 21-year-old student took her own life after the university she was in sent her a wrong email, where she was told that she had failed her exams.
Mared Foulkes, who is from Anglesey, North Wales, passed away on July 8, 2021, after falling from the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait.
Foulkes was a student at the Cardiff University.
She was in her second year, studying pharmaceuticals. She also worked part-time in a pharmacy for a couple of years.
An inquest in Caernarfon today was told Miss Foulkes had received an automated email hours before her death.
In the email, she was told that she had failed her re-sit exam and would not be moving on to third year.
An email that she had received stated that she had failed with a score of 39 percent, when in fact she had passed the exam.
She scored 62 percent.
The 39 per cent related to a previous exam she had failed on March 26, not the re-sit exam that she had taken.
Professor Mark Gumbleton, Head of School, told the inquest there were lessons that they will always learn.
Iona Foulkes, the mother, said that she felt it was plain and simple that the actions of her daughter were the direct result of getting the email from her school.
She added:
She received an automatic email – there was nothing personal – no phone call, nothing. She believed she had failed and the email said she could not progress with her degree. She was devoted to her course and to her work in the pharmacy, she would have been horrified. She would have felt like all her dreams and aspirations had finished with that sentence – for a 21-year-old it’s unbelievable.
When the pandemic started, the student was forced to complete her studies online.
The inquest was also told that Foulkes went to work that morning and had a dinner with her parents and brother.
The student then told her mother that she was going to Tesco in Bangor to get ingredients to make a cheesecake the following day.
After leaving the house of her parents, Foulkes drove to Britannia Bridge, where she took her own life.
The mother said that her daughter did not mention the results that she had received that day.
Foulkes also id that her daughter did not show any signs of feeling down in the lead up to her death, however, she was upset by the recent death of her grandmother.
Anwen Jones, a witness of the incident, was driving onto Anglesey with her 10-year-old son when Miss Foulkes appeared to show ‘no hesitation’ in her actions.
Talking about the incident, Jones said:
She just went up and over in a split second – there was no stopping and thinking. She just disappeared.
The emergency services were called by members of the public, however, Foulkes was pronounced dead at the scene.
A post-mortem examination later revealed that she sustained a lethal head injury in the fall.
