Croughton is the kind of place that exists on the edge of other places. It sits in south Northamptonshire near the Oxfordshire border, a village of a few hundred people, mostly stone cottages with thatched or slate roofs, set among hedgerows and rolling pasture. RAF Croughton, just outside the village, is a US Air Force communications and intelligence facility - a relay station for satellite and undersea cable traffic, one of the most important American listening posts in Europe. The base sits behind perimeter fencing on land the RAF has held since the Second World War. Most of the people who pass through Croughton are not from Croughton. The cottages here have stood for centuries. The base, technically, has not.

What happened next is a story about parents. Harry's mother Charlotte and his father Tim, separated but united in this, did not let their son's death become a footnote in a diplomatic file. Within days of Harry's death, Anne Sacoolas left the United Kingdom on a flight - according to The Telegraph, probably from the US airbase at Mildenhall - and the American embassy claimed diplomatic immunity on her behalf. Charlotte and Tim sought legal advice. Two leading specialist lawyers on diplomatic immunity, Mark Stephens and Geoffrey Robertson, told them that Sacoolas was not entitled to immunity at all, since her husband was not on the diplomatic list. The family launched a CrowdJustice campaign. They flew to Washington. They sat in television studios in two countries. They wrote, they called, they refused to go away.

On 15 October 2019, Charlotte and Tim went to the White House expecting to meet with a senior official. They were taken in to meet President Donald Trump. Trump told them Sacoolas was waiting in the next room and would come in if they wanted. The family and their lawyer refused: any meeting with the woman who killed Harry, they said, had to happen on British soil, with the courts involved. Trump later told a phone-in radio host that Sacoolas had 'a compelling story to tell.' The family's spokesman said it became clear after the meeting that the president had intended to offer them a payment, and that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had been told to stand by to write a cheque. Charlotte and Tim declined. What they wanted was a trial, not money.

It took three years for the case to reach a courtroom. In January 2020 the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally rejected the UK's extradition request. In February 2021 a US federal court in Virginia revealed publicly that Sacoolas herself had worked for the CIA - undermining the immunity claim, since US intelligence staff are not covered by the 1995 UK-US agreement. The family's civil claim against her was settled in September 2021; the terms were not made public. On 20 October 2022, at the Old Bailey in London, Sacoolas appeared by video link from the United States and pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving. She had refused to plead guilty to the more serious charge of dangerous driving. On 8 December 2022, Mrs Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb sentenced her to eight months in prison, suspended for twelve months, and disqualified her from driving for twelve months. The US government had advised Sacoolas not to attend the sentencing in person, despite the judge's request. At the inquest in June 2024, Sacoolas's statement said: 'I made a tragic mistake that I will live with every single day for the rest of my life. There is not a single day that goes by that Harry is not on my mind and I am deeply sorry for the pain that I have caused.'

In December 2022, in a letter to Charlotte and Tim, Transport Secretary Mark Harper promised to act on a review of road safety around US bases. The road from RAF Croughton to the village was given clear road markings directing drivers to keep left. The diplomatic immunity loophole that had let Sacoolas leave - the 1995 'arrangement' that the British Foreign Office had read as covering dependants of US intelligence staff - was formally closed in July 2020, though not retroactively. In June 2025 Charlotte Charles was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to road safety. An independent review the same month criticised the leadership of Northamptonshire Police; Assistant Chief Constable Emma James apologised publicly to the family for what she called 'a failure on our part to do the very best for the victim in this case, Harry, and his family who fought tirelessly in the years that followed to achieve justice for him.' Harry would have been about to start his apprenticeship. He never did. What his family did, in the years that followed, changed the law.