The family of Lady Gabriella Windsor’s husband Thomas Kingston have spoken in an emotional interview for the first time since he ended his own life last year after reacting to his medication.
Mr Kingston, whose marriage to Lady Gabriella at Windsor Castle in 2019 was attended by the late Queen, died at 45 by suicide after he shot himself inside an out-house at his parents home in February last year.
An inquest into his death was told he had recently been experiencing anxiety and when he took his life and had not long stopped taking antidepressants prescribed by a Buckingham Palace doctor.
The inquest prompted a warning from coroner’s over the way antidepressants are prescribed.
His parents, Martin and Jill Kingston, have now called for a change in how antidepressants are prescribed.
In the heartbreaking BBC Radio 4 interview this morning, Mr Kingston, who had to break a door down to get to get to his son, described Thomas as ‘joyful, giving, full of life and caring person’.
He added: ‘I would like him to be remembered as someone with a big smile on his face.’
After his death, the family received over 400 cards and letters, he said, adding: ‘So many of them told us things that we never knew.’
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Recalling the tragic day of her son’s death, his mother Mrs Kingston said she and her husband had enjoyed a lunch with their son.
‘He was normal, he was fun. we were laughing about various things. there was nothing that raised any suspicion in our mind,’ she said.
After their lunch they were relaxing and reading books around the fire place at home before Mrs Kingston and her son fell asleep on the sofa.
After a while, her husband got up to go for a walk and Thomas woke up to unload his car with things he had brought from London to be stored in a room inside his parent’s out-house.
His parents grew worried when their son did not return after sorting out his belongings.
Recalling the tragic moment she and her husband found their son dead, Mrs Kingston said: ‘There was a room nearby where he would have put all his stuff so we knew he’d gone up there, so that’s where i went to look for him.
‘When I went up it was all quiet and he obviously wasn’t up there so I went back to the house and checked his room and all his bags were all ready for going back to London, so I went back up and that’s when I noticed the locked door.’
Mr Kingston said: ‘When Gill couldn’t find Tom and realised one of the rooms in the outbuilding was locked and that was, yeah… I had to break the door down.’
With a shaky voice, he added: ‘I would have difficulty explaining to what it was like without crying.’
Mr and Mrs Kingston said they have relied on their Christian faith to get them through their gut-wrenching grief.
Thomas had been struggling with depression and anxiety before he took his own life and had been prescribed two types of antidepressants and sleeping pills.
The first was the SSRI Sertraline which he stopped taking after telling his doctor they were not working.
He was then prescribed another SSRI called Citalopram but he also stopped using those after he found them to be ineffective.
After Thomas’s death, Senior coroner Katy Skerrett raised concerns over whether there is ‘adequate communication’ regarding the risks of suicide with such pills.
His parents are now calling for a change to how SSRI’s are prescribed to better warn patients of the side effects and risks.
