In April 2006, Alison Davies drove with her son Ryan from their home in Stockport in Greater Manchester to the Humber Bridge near Hull in the UK. Following a phone call to the local Humberside police, she is alleged to have taken her son's hand and jumped from the bridge to the river below. ‘I have failed as a Mother’ was the subsequent frontpage headline of the Daily Mail on 18 April, reporting on the two deaths and picking up on the words of Davies' sister, Lindsay Cook: ‘She feels a failure as a mother. She thinks she's a burden to us and that to save us all the worry she'll take herself and Ryan away and we'll never have to worry about them again.’ Ryan, as the newspaper made clear in the subheading on the front page, was autistic. He was, according to Cook, ‘very friendly and trusting but completely unable to cope on his own’, while according to the other family friends the paper talked to he was an ‘increasingly difficult only child’.

Ryan Davies' death was not a unique event. There are a number of cases each year, often given high-profile coverage in the media, where children with autism die at the hands of family members, usually parents. Kathleen Seidel, who organizes neurodiversity.com, a website that covers a multiplicity of autism-related issues, has a section entitled ‘Murder of Autistic Persons’, which lists numerous instances of such deaths.