18/09/2026
We don’t talk enough about elopement, and how easy it happens. Including to the people who are doing everything right.
A long time ago, I worked a in special school class with three nonspeaking teenagers with complex learning disabilities. I remember what the everyday work involved.
Breaktimes (which the staff need too, but we still spent them being hypervigilant) were spent outside in one break area, which was connected to a larger play area by a waist-height wooden fence. We stood outside, watching the students as they spent their free time doing whatever made them happy. Sometimes staring at the world outside the school, sometimes looking at something in the sky catching their interest. Sometimes walking around the tree, maybe peeling away a bit of bark. Sometimes just recreationally laughing. Sometimes sat down next to us, or walking up to us to laugh.
Once in a while, an adult would ask a question. Or pass us a drink. Or anything at all that commanded our attention for 3-5 seconds.
And a lot of the time, we’d look back at the students and find one suddenly halfway over the wooden fence, running off to the play equipment and finding the whole thing hilarious.
In that environment, a well-contained school equipped to handle elopement, there was little to worry about other than the inconvenience. (Although you do get stories of students successfully eloping from schools, unfortunately.)
So I learned in a relatively safe place that when you’re caring for an autistic young person with learning difficulties, who are very fast with no sense of danger, they REALLY CAN elope at a moment’s notice, and it really can happen ANY SECOND. And unless you’re like my former Special Forces friend, who was trained to watch targets for literally days at a time, you don’t have the concentration for it any more than the rest of us.
Tragically, we come to the topic of three-year-old Noah, who eloped while out with his grandfather. And to the keyboard warriors who have clearly never known the type of child who Noah was, much less worked with them or parented them. To those confidently asking “how on Earth can you lose a child like that?!”
Simple. The same way our students made it over that waist-high fence. Because sometimes, someone passes us a drink.
When it comes to Noah, I don’t know his needs profile or personal circumstances, and frankly they’re none of my business. Maybe he’d never shown warning signs of eloping until that day. Maybe he’d only just got big enough to run fast. One thing’s for sure: his family knew his needs, knew that he didn’t respond to his name, and still considered that park a safe environment based on their knowledge of their child.
And now that Noah’s dead, I’m seeing two things: the majority being an outpouring of sympathy for Noah, with the occasional piece of sickening judgement.
I can’t even imagine what poor Noah’s family are going through right now. How his grandfather will be seeing himself, forever feeling guilty for whatever happened in those 3-5 seconds. How the family dynamic will have changed. How they’re now under the scrutiny of a whole internet of faux-experts saying what they would definitely, definitely have done in their position.
Some of my friends have autistic kids who wear tracking bracelets, 24/7, including in bed. Some of these kids can escape houses, break locks, have no sense of danger and are drawn to water. They have to lock down their house every night. Their experience of autism mixed with learning disabilities is very different to mine (and I say this as someone with an autistic stepkid with learning disabilities).
To any of those keyboard warriors who are trying to twist the knife during this time of tragedy, win online arguments and so on, all I have to say is this:
There are no winners in a situation like this. Stop trying to be one. Just mourn Noah.
And let’s learn from this, especially in the UK where we haven’t had many of these stories in the headlines before. If a child like Noah goes missing, IMMEDIATELY guard all the nearby bodies of water. Perhaps even before the roads - because although roads have cars, at least there are humans inside those cars and a responsible one might stop and help. Meanwhile, autistic children are 160 times more likely to drown than non-autistic children, so we really should be bearing this in mind during emergency responses.
Rest in peace, Noah.
