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I survived heroin addiction and took on the Mexican cartels

I survived heroin addiction and took on the Mexican cartels

Telegraph19-05-2025
After he had stopped blackout drinking, stopped injecting heroin, Tim MacGabhann went swimming. It was early 2015, and the Kilkenny-born writer was by the Pacific, 500 miles from Mexico City, where he was living. 'I was on my first drug-free holiday,' he says. 'And I got in a rip tide off the coast of Sayulita.' The fast-flowing current carried him rapidly out to sea. 'I was thinking, 'F--k, this could be it',' he recalls. 'I ended up willing myself to stay calm and not thrash and not even waste oxygen shouting for help, because that just makes you panic.' When the rip finally released him, he was a long way from shore. Spoiler: he was able to make the swim to the beach.
There's a reason he's telling me this story, beyond its pay-off ('The next sandwich was great'). MacGabhann had felt that sense of terror before, and staying calm was something he'd learned to do. 'I was like, 'Just do what you did every time you were very scared of dying. Just watch your own panic as if it was happening at a remove.''
Before that near-death moment, there had been nine years of finding escape in oblivion, a period that the 34-year-old writes about in The Black Pool, a deadpan, poetic account of his time as an addict that will be published on May 22. 'In those days, waking up was a roulette wheel,' he writes. He could be in a cantina, a courtyard, a cemetery, on 'floors crunchy with broken glass in postcodes that I'd had no idea existed'. Just writing about that time would bring on the physical sensations of it; he'd find himself sweating with anxiety, a fluttering panic widening across his chest, the same terror that he'd felt in the riptide.
There were other moments, working as a freelance journalist in Mexico, which brought close the threat of death. Writing stories about gangs, drug trafficking, corruption or organised crime could get you killed, especially if you were local. MacGabhann wrote about priests murdered by 'narcos'; human traffickers and vanished women; gangs kidnapping endurance runners from indigenous communities then forcing them to cross the US border with backpacks full of heroin and fentanyl. He met one of the victims, who had been 'immediately arrested, went to jail, returned, totally taciturn about the experience'.
The White House's justification of punitive tariffs against the country for its failure to stop drug smuggling ignores an inconvenient truth, he believes. 'It all goes through [US] ports of entry, the big influx of substances is at customs.'
He describes how danger arrived at his door in The Black Pool, in an encounter that begins with a red pickup waiting outside his flat, with four men in it, 'eyes blank as river pebbles'. He soon realised that 's_______ myself or pissing myself or begging or panicking was not going to make this moment any better' and all he could do was 'take a last look at the coiling fog, the dark blue air, the cobbled streets, try to make it look the way Kilkenny looked'.
He walked away from that encounter. Yet it was the murder of a photojournalist friend, Rubén Espinosa, and four others, that provoked MacGabhann to write his debut novel, the thriller Call Him Mine (2019), about what can happen if you upset the wrong people in Mexico. 'While I was stressing out about my stories, my neighbours were being tortured and beaten and finally shot to death,' he wrote in the Irish Times. He sees crime fiction as 'the flip side of modernism', employing the same techniques and manipulation of form. 'It's a great way of investigating class and power, money, politics, without people feeling that they're being preached at.'
He's loved the genre ever since he read Conan Doyle as a boy, marvelling at Holmes and Watson racing through London in a hansom cab, with 'Sherlock Holmes mapping the city as they go. I just felt whole worlds shooting off from the little details that he's pointing to.' He remembers thinking, 'this is Dickens, only faster.' The modernists, meanwhile, remain a 'constant presence'. 'That period feels like the Big Bang,' he says. 'We're still picking through the cooling meteorites.' He shows me the heavily worked manuscript of the PhD about Joyce, Beckett and the anti-plot novel that he's working on for a doctorate at the University of East Anglia.
We're not in Norwich or Mexico, though. MacGabhann (it's pronounced MacGowan) moved to Paris a year ago and meets me near the Jardin de Luxembourg. Close by is the beautiful, high-ceilinged apartment he shares with his girlfriend and her two children. He's a flamboyant character, with very long hair and a huge drooping moustache that would have allowed him to move incognito around Laurel Canyon in the early 1970s.
His knuckles bear the legend Y N W A and his arm a Liver bird that explains its provenance ('You'll Never Walk Alone'). He's crazy about football, but there are tattoos of birds and 'religious stuff', too. ('I really have a problem with Catholic stuff, but I feel branded with it.' He found the passing of Pope Francis very affecting. 'I didn't expect to be so moved by it.') Details from Dürer and Caravaggio, also on his arms, nestle near a heron from Ovid's Metamorphoses and a cormorant, his favourite bird.
Before Paris and Mexico, there was Brasília and 'all the bad stuff that happened there', where he hung around bus stops to score crack or 'a crap injectable heroinlike syrup', and where it was 'a false economy to try to negotiate, or shop around, or head off into the undergrowth, because you might leave your phone or your bank card or even your shoes behind you there'. Before that was Barcelona, where he first began shooting up heroin. And before that was Trinity College, Dublin, source of the book's title (Dubh Linn means 'black pool' in Gaelic), where he won a scholarship and academic prizes, and began drinking away an inheritance from his grandfather, who had made his money from a business that turned scrap corrugated metal into barns. His parents had both been primary school teachers, his father a principal.
Post-university, MacGabhann began teaching English abroad. In each place, there are memories of humiliations that become progressively more extreme in the memoir, culminating in him being grabbed by Mexican police at a protest about 43 'disappeared' student teachers. They dumped him miles from home without cash or bank cards. The depredations of the journey back are exquisitely vivid. By the second day, 'I was hungry, but stuff rots so fast in the heat that going through the bins didn't seem worth it,' he writes. 'I had become everybody I'd ever refused to give change to, everybody I'd looked through, everybody I'd shaken my head at and said, 'Sorry, another time' to.'
A chance meeting during that harrowing episode brought him to Narcotics Anonymous. It is a plot twist, he says; had it not happened, 'I think I might have been able to patch together enough excuses to think that this isn't the worst. I could have found someone who'd let me sleep on their couch and have me exhaust their patience for another while longer. It could have kept going, definitely.' Going to NA convinced him to go through withdrawal. He still goes to meetings.
'They should feel more ghostly than they do,' he says. 'Everyone's like, 'Oh, I should be dead' – it could be a bunch of ghosts.' They have helped him to understand the telling of his story, though. 'You'll tell something really straight, just really grimly, you know. And you hear everyone laugh. It's not the reaction you were looking for… they just laugh at you, or laugh with you, or they laugh in recognition… and you're like, 'that's good, actually.''
Does the book fit the mould of a 'misery memoir'? 'I really hope not,' he says, smiling. 'Not the Irish ones anyway.' He wanted to avoid the redemptive narrative – 'I came through this thing, and now my life is so good' – too. 'We're addicted to plot, you know, as readers, as watchers, I'm addicted to plot, and I think addiction stuff that has a plot can fall into that.'
Anyway, he realised that the blackouts had been too severe to impose a traditional structure of 'what I was like, what happened, how it is now', as 'I couldn't remember the bits in between': the book's subtitle is A Memoir of Forgetting. A fellow addict in recovery told him wistfully how he'd been reading up on the effects of a particular drug on brain chemistry: 'He said, 'it's like 300,000 orgasms at once… We'll never feel that good again, physiologically.' And I said, 'well I can't f--king remember it, anyway.''
The cravings were very quick to go, because 'it just wasn't worth it,' he says. There is lasting regret about some of his 'a--hole behaviour', but as to his addiction, he says. 'I don't ask 'why?' any more. I don't feel sad about it… it helps me connect to people who've been through horrible stuff.' He's certainly not keen to cast it as part of the writerly experience that shapes fiction and memoirs stretching back to Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), via Mary Karr's Lit (2008), Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and William S Burroughs's Junkie (1953). 'It's not, like, 500 grammes of suffering equals one kilo of art or something good.' Besides, he notes, Burroughs 'had a lot more fun than I did.'
His rejection of plot and causality in The Black Pool does have its roots in his drug experience, though. 'When you live in that space where you do one thing, you take a drink, you do a line, or bang up, whatever, and then mad s--- happens… it's like, 'I just wanted to get high, why is all this other f_____ up stuff happening?'' The idea that 'you do X and Y happens' no longer made sense to him.
He elected to write something more experimental, although the memoir's hallucinated encounter with Marcel Proust, he insists, actually happened. The book was 'just about the sentence', he says. His 'tuning forks' were the 'flat, relentless drive' of Greg Baxter's 2014 novel Munich Airport; Colm Tóibín 's 2019 essay in the LRB about his testicular cancer ('he was telling it so plainly, but with this quiet force'); and Cathy Sweeney 's response to motherhood, Breakdown, published last year, which he says, takes the 'noir urgency' of a great detective novel 'and applies it to a domestic escape'. MacGabhann wrote 'with the sound in mind rather than the sense', finding that it 'unlocked other depths of memory'. It's not a surprise that he's been working on a poetry collection, Found in a Context of Destruction, to be published early next year. A book of short stories, Saints, is coming out, too, later this year.
In the book he is struck by the thought that he has read versions of himself written into literature for 200 years – the 'superfluous, overeducated young idiot who hadn't been consumed by a war or a revolution… Pick up the end of any century and you'd shake out a million of me,' he writes.
'I think there's a huge amount of alienated and despairing people who do feel like they're just copies of one another,' he explains, 'and if they could just connect, they wouldn't feel like they're a copy of a copy.'
Writing the book exhausted him. 'I just have nothing left to say about the topic of addiction, or me, or recovery,' he says.
He's found alternatives, such as meditation, to the ones he pursued back then. 'I wasn't very good at doing drugs,' he insists. 'I went to this really cool cloud forest once, and I got a load of [the psychedelic drug] DMT. Then I spent the night lying on the porch on a cushion, watching the rain and listening to Electric Light Orchestra.' He starts to laugh. 'Like, if I can't do that properly…'
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My brain FLIPPED in my skull as my head smashed against the road when a drunk driver ploughed into me then ran off
My brain FLIPPED in my skull as my head smashed against the road when a drunk driver ploughed into me then ran off

The Sun

time9 hours ago

  • The Sun

My brain FLIPPED in my skull as my head smashed against the road when a drunk driver ploughed into me then ran off

JAMES Bradley was waiting for a bus when a car ploughed into him with such force that his brain flipped inside his skull. What was just a moment in the drunk-driver's life became a three-year battle to save James' through 10 gruelling surgeries. 9 9 9 James, who was visiting from Dubai at the time of the brutal hit-and-run on Bushey High Street, Hertfordshire, on Boxing Day 2021, had to completely relearn how to read, write, speak and walk in the wake of his ordeal. The high-flying project manager, now 37, tells Sun Health: 'I was just crossing the road and the guy hit me out of nowhere. I was knocked completely unconscious. 'He slung me from the right-hand side. I smacked my arm against the windscreen and smashed my head against the floor. 'I landed right in the middle of the road, and the bus nearly ran me over as well.' After stopping down the road just moments after hitting James, then 34, the driver fled the scene - leaving his innocent victim helpless on the tarmac. He says: 'My friends saw me in the middle of the road, then noticed the driver stop and get out of the car. 'He started swearing because he'd seen me on the ground. 'I believe he wiped down the steering wheel, then took his possessions and just ran off. 'There was a pub next door and he ran through the garden and jumped over the fence.' James says there were drugs and alcohol in the vehicle, and the car didn't even belong to him. As James' panic-stricken pals waited for an ambulance to arrive, two heroic nurses, who were held up in the police cordon, rushed over to help. He says: 'Jodie Bannister and Mary Walsh saw me lying in the road and raced over. 'Jodie got her coat and wrapped me in it.' On the way to St. Mary's Hospital in London, James' heart stopped. Thankfully, medics were able to stabilise him in time to deliver him to intensive care. He adds: 'I went straight in to have a CT scan and then immediately into surgery. 'They had to cut open my skull to relieve the pressure on my brain. 'They said my brain flipped from one side to the other. The pressure on my brain had moved the actual brain itself.' 9 9 9 James' elbow was also shattered into 50 pieces, and he had to have sections of his leg and hip removed to help rebuild the joint. After his life-saving surgery, he was placed into a medical coma - one that doctors were unsure if he would ever wake up from. James' brother, Paul, says the family would video call the ward every day in the desperate hope for positive change. Paul, 40, says: 'Back then, we were still dealing with the ramifications of Covid, so we had to do a lot of Zoom calls. 'Every day he was in a coma, we phoned as a family and would say, 'Any change?' and they would say, 'No'. 'We did this for weeks, but it felt like months.' Miraculously, James defied the doctors' fears, and he woke up after three and a half weeks - but he's still got a long way to go. James says: 'I'm still not fully there yet. 'I've only just finalised my rehabilitation three years after the accident because the injury was on the left side of my brain, which impacts your speech and language. 'I've had four surgeries on my brain and another four on my elbow. 'I still have one functional arm and two more surgeries to go, so I'm still not finished. 'I'll probably never be finished, but I'll always look to move forward.' James has also developed epilepsy and has suffered six severe seizures, one of which resulted in his head being re-stitched. His memory has also been heavily affected. Epilepsy after a brain injury EPILEPSY happens when the normal electrical activity in your brain changes. It's thought to be related to genes you inherit from your parents, or to changes in your genes, but it can be caused by brain damage. This includes a head injury, stroke or an infection. The Epilepsy Foundation says: "When there is a traumatic blow to the head, or a jarring or shaking of the brain, the impact of the brain against the rough edges on the inside of the skull can cause tearing of the coverings of the brain, tissues, and blood vessels that may cause bleeding. "The impact can also cause bruising (contusion) and swelling (edema) of the brain. "Since the brain is covered by the skull, there is only a small amount of room for it to swell. "This causes pressure inside the skull to increase, which can lead to additional widespread brain injury." Epilepsy cannot currently be cured, but treatment can often help manage it, including medication and surgery. Source: NHS, Epilepsy Foundation After a procedure to add new plates under his scalp to replace the missing half of his skull, he developed an infection. James says: 'Because I had my head open, I essentially didn't have a skull, just skin covering my brain. 'On the day that the tissue around my metal skull got infected, they had to cut muscle out of my face, just above my temple, to get into the actual infection part of my skull. 'When they do these head surgeries, you have to have half your skull taken out, and you lie in bed with the worst headaches for weeks. 'Then you come out again and have to rebuild. It was demoralising.' I was at the bottom of the barrel and felt I had nothing left in my life to live for anymore. I was completely broken. James Despite saving his life, the countless operations and the visible damage to James' face and head left him suicidal. He says: 'I was at the bottom of the barrel and felt I had nothing left in my life to live for anymore. I was completely broken. 'I didn't want to go outside. I didn't want people to see me. 'I hated the way I looked, so I didn't really want to go to the gym, but I eventually plucked up the courage to go back. 'Because I've been in hospital for so long, I've lost all my muscle. 'I've been trying to rebuild the muscle and get my life back.' 9 9 9 Because the years after his accident were a blur of hospital visits, surgeries and rehabilitation, the severity of James' injuries didn't fully register until he returned to St Mary's Hospital for a check-up in 2022. After chatting about his time in the ICU, a doctor suggested he visit the ward where he spent weeks in a coma. When James walked through the doors and laid eyes on his personal nurse, Rebecca, she struggled to hold back tears. Paul, a personal trainer, says: 'These nurses have to be 'on it', and all they are dealing with is negativity and drama - bad, bad people who are close to death. 'Rebecca came out, almost crying, and told James, 'We never get to see the success stories, we never find out what happens when people leave here'. 'She turned around to James and told him how pleased she was to see him because he was the sickest person on the ward. 'I think that was the moment when it really hit home for James. 'I think until then, the penny hadn't dropped. In that moment, he realised he'd had a second lease of life.' 'Life is so precious' James, who once worked for Exxon Mobil, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world, is now writing a book. He hopes The Will To Survive will inspire others who have experienced life-changing injuries. But writing has come with its challenges. James says he often gets tired after looking at a screen for prolonged periods and sometimes the words don't flow as easily. 'I want to be able to help other people who have had similar experiences to me,' he adds. 'It will be autobiographical, but will be filled with things I've learned in my recovery.' As the car didn't belong to the person driving at the time of the incident, police were never able to charge him. For some, the injustice would be almost too much to bear. But James, who is now waiting to have more surgery on his arm and face, takes a vastly different approach and says the crash was one of the 'best things' to have happened to him. 'I feel sorry for him, really,' he says. 'I'm not saying that anyone should have to nearly die to feel this way, but honestly, it's one of the best things that's happened to me because now I've learned the true aspect of life. 'Life is so precious and it's completely opened my eyes - especially to how we should treat one another. 'I'm not angry towards him anymore, it's just one of those things you have to get over. 'He was obviously going through a time where he felt it was OK to leave me. I've not got hatred for the guy.'

My kind uncle was murdered by cannabis-crazed mum… as experts warn Class B drug is fuelling wave of psychotic killers
My kind uncle was murdered by cannabis-crazed mum… as experts warn Class B drug is fuelling wave of psychotic killers

The Sun

time9 hours ago

  • The Sun

My kind uncle was murdered by cannabis-crazed mum… as experts warn Class B drug is fuelling wave of psychotic killers

WHEN pensioner Roger Leadbeater was brutally murdered in cold blood while out walking his dog in a Sheffield park, his distraught family were completely at a loss. "As a family, we can barely believe such a kind, gentle soul could be taken in such a way,' they said in a statement, highlighting how the 74-year-old's faithful springer spaniel refused to leave his side while he lay dying that fateful evening in August 2023. 17 17 17 It later emerged the woman charged with killing him, then 32-year-old schizophrenic Emma Borowy, was a habitual cannabis user who, when not being treated in a mental health hospital, would sacrifice feeding herself to pay for the drug. Mother-of-one Borowy, who died in a suspected suicide in prison in December 2023, had absconded from Royal Bolton Hospital eight times since she was sectioned in October 2022, and each time she escaped she would buy weed and display increasingly concerning psychotic behaviour. 'As far as I could see she was never reprimanded at all for having cannabis despite having it every time she left and even having it on hospital grounds,' Roger's grieving niece, Angela Hector, 56, told The Sun. 'I am now so scared of what cannabis can do. This has had a massive impact on us as a family. We have lost somebody really important to us.' In May this year, London Mayor Sadiq Khan backed a call for the partial decriminalisation of possession of the Class B drug in a recent report by the London Drugs Commission. It suggested doing so could free up law enforcement and court resources, as individuals caught with small amounts might face warnings, fines or community service, and eventually pave the way towards a regulated cannabis market. But the suggestion set alarm bells ringing for Roger's family - and the Police and Crime Commissioner for Dorset, David Sidwick. He wrote a letter to police minister Dame Diana Johnson which was signed by 13 other PCCs, claiming the effect of the drug in society may, in actual fact, be 'far worse' than heroin, and it should be upgraded to Class A - a belief shared by the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Mr Sidwick said: 'It is a chronically dangerous drug that we haven't gripped. The whole world has been subjected to a PR campaign in the other direction. 'I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 30 years and this drug has long-term chronic side effects. 'It is associated with more birth defects than thalidomide and is linked to more than 20 cancers. Not to mention the issues with psychosis and drug driving.' Mr Sidwick's concerns are echoed by the findings of a Sun probe which reveals cannabis is behind a mental health epidemic that has seen a third of people presenting with psychosis in London developing it from heavy use of high strength weed. The THC levels - the mind-altering element in weed - nowadays is almost seven times stronger than it was 35 years ago, shooting up from three per cent to 15-20 per cent in potent modern-day cultivated cannabis. The increase has a frightening effect on the addictiveness of the substance, making users, particularly teenagers with developing brains, vulnerable to mental health issues with prolonged heavy use, which can progress to violent disorders - sometimes with deadly consequences. 'Epidemic' 17 17 Psychiatrist professor Sir Robin Murray, who specialises in psychosis at King's College, London, told The Sun: 'To the parents in their 40s and 50s who see their children smoking cannabis, they need to be aware that it is a very different substance to what it was years ago. 'The result is that it's far more addictive. We're seeing smokers having up to 20 joints a day. 'We are at the beginnings of an epidemic of cannabis-induced psychosis. 'About a third of the people in London who present with psychosis have developed it from heavy use of high potency cannabis. 'The mental health service is a right mess. One of the reasons for that is that we've got more people who are psychotic than we're expected to have. 'Half of those people with cannabis induced psychosis will develop schizophrenia in five years. 'But it is not schizophrenia that makes you violent, it's cannabis that makes you violent. 'Cannabis makes you paranoid, so if you're hearing voices from God commanding you to do something, then you're seeing violence in a bizarre and horrifying murder that is not like plotting to kill your wife in six weeks time, but a sudden psychotic episode where you kill whoever you come across.' The effects of this were seen on June 27, when Marcus Arduini-Monzo, 37, was jailed for life after he murdered 14-year-old Daniel Anjorin with a samurai sword as he walked to school in a 20-minute rampage in East London. The appalling attack was blamed on Arduini-Monzo's cannabis misuse. Links to violence 17 17 17 Cannabis is currently a Class B drug, along with ketamine and amphetamines. It was returned to Class B after being downgraded to Class C by Labour between 2004 and 2009. English teacher Ross Grainger runs a blog cataloguing cannabis-related violent crimes called Attacker Smoked Cannabis, and has written a book of the same name - inspired by the phrase he uses when searching for incidents. He told The Sun: 'I started this in 2017 when I was worried we could be going in the direction of decriminalisation and I realised there was a problem. 'I'd say there has been a steady violent episode every two weeks for the past 30 years - and what I log is the tip of the iceberg. 'I log murders, suicides, rapes, drug driving and terrorism. 'I was struck by how it is considered a peaceful drug that couldn't in any way lead to violence, yet the evidence I read as I began researching showed how strongly that is not the case, and how strongly it is linked to terrible violence. I'd say there has been a steady violent episode every two weeks for the past 30 years - and what I log is the tip of the iceberg... For me, there is no drug worse than cannabis Ross Grainger 'I see the same pattern emerging where a young person has cannabis from a young age, loses their mind and commits a terrible act of ultraviolence. 'You'd be forgiven for thinking it is legal in this country. Really it is decriminalised in all but name. 'For me, there is no drug worse than cannabis. Other drugs have horrendous side-effects, but what can be worse than actually losing your mind? 'It seems crazy to me that a Government can be so anti-smoking, and do so well in enforcing a ban, but then be so lax at enforcing cannabis legislation.' 'Cannabis took my son' 17 17 17 Heartbroken mum, Julie Romani, 60, from Bradford, West Yorks., knows only too well the harmful effects cannabis addiction can have after her son Jordan took his own life in September 2017, aged 27. He'd started smoking cannabis as a young teenager and couldn't function without it. The widowed property developer and mum-of-two, whose husband died aged 61 in 2011, when Jordan was 21, said: 'My husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer when Jordan was 14, so I think that's when he started to develop a habit. 'We didn't know what was going on. We put mood swings down to him being a teenager, but the emotional instability, nastiness and anger continued and got worse over the years. 'He was depressed and ended up where he couldn't get a grip on reality. He used to say the only thing that made him happy was his 'Happy Baccy'. 'He tried so hard to quit and had even stopped smoking it for three months before he died, but he couldn't cope with it and couldn't cope without it. 'Jordan had everything to live for but the cannabis took him.' After Jordan's death Julie set up a charity, Help For Dependency, and now raises awareness of the dangers of cannabis to mental health. 'Chicken and egg' situation 17 17 Investigative journalist Julian Hendy founded the charity Hundred Families after his father Philip, 75, was killed by mentally ill Stephen Newton in a drug-induced psychosis in 2007. Newton lay in wait for Philip to emerge from buying a newspaper before fatally stabbing him in the street in Bristol. Julian's charity has now backed over 300 families who have lost loved ones at the hands of mentally ill patients, many of whom were under the influence of cannabis. He said: 'Cannabis and serious mental health problems are very common to go together. Around 70 per cent of those with serious mental illness also abuse drugs. 'It is sometimes difficult to know which caused the other in a chicken and egg situation. 'There's a lot that needs to be done in treating mental illness and stopping patients from being involved in drugs that can cause schizophrenia and make mental illness worse. 'In the case of my dad, the services knew this chap took drugs and they didn't do anything to stop him taking these drugs. Jordan tried so hard to quit and had even stopped smoking it for three months before he died, but he couldn't cope with it and couldn't cope without it. Jordan had everything to live for but the cannabis took him Julie Romani 'The death of my dad was very preventable. They should have done better to save my dad, they didn't do so, and I see that in lots of cases. 'My father's killer got a murder conviction, which you don't always get. It was found that he had made the dangerous choice of taking drugs that caused him to become psychotic and murder and therefore he was held responsible and jailed for 16 years in October 2008. 'Yet in the case of Valdo Calocane, who committed the Nottingham murders of 19-year-old university students Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, and caretaker Ian Coates, 65, he was not tested for drugs, and was convicted on the grounds of diminished responsibility. 'Then you get shorter sentences in hospital which doesn't feel like justice for the families. 'He should have been tested for drugs at the time of his arrest and he wasn't. 'Right now people who present with problems due to cannabis will not be helped because cannabis is the cause, unless they have psychosis, and only then they sometimes get the help. 'Mental health services seem to be aware this is a common problem but they don't actually take enough effective steps to try to stop people becoming psychotic.' 17 17 Crazed cannabis killers JAKE NOTMAN Jake Notman, 28, was jailed for eight years and eight months after admitting to killing his girlfriend, Lauren Bloomer, during a psychotic episode triggered by a cannabis brownie. In November 2020, Notman stabbed Bloomer more than 30 times and ran her over outside their Tamworth home. Bloomer, 25, had begun recording on her phone after seeking help online for Notman's bad reaction to the drug. The audio recorded her screams and Notman's chilling words before the sound of a revving engine and a thud. Neighbours saw him run over her and return indoors without offering help. Notman later called 999, saying he'd been told he killed his girlfriend. Prosecutors initially charged him with murder, but psychiatric experts concluded he couldn't distinguish reality at the time. The court accepted his manslaughter plea. The judge said the killing was 'unexpected and frightful,' partly caused by the drug. PIETRO ADDIS Pietro Addis, 19, was jailed for 15 years in May 2023 after fatally stabbing his grandmother, Sue Addis, at her home in Withdean, East Sussex, in January 2021. Though he admitted the killing, a jury accepted his plea of diminished responsibility due to a psychotic episode, finding him guilty of manslaughter. Addis, diagnosed with ADHD in 2018, had been living with his grandmother but tensions rose over his cannabis use. At the time of the attack, Brighton restaurateur Sue was seeking professional help for him. On the day of the incident, Addis called 999, and police discovered Sue in the bath with 17 stab wounds. Judge Christine Laing KC stated that despite his mental condition, Addis bore significant responsibility. He must serve at least 10 years in custody and five on licence. DANIEL O'HARA WRIGHT Daniel O'Hara Wright, 24, was found not guilty of murdering his mum, Carole Wright, by reason of insanity after a harrowing trial at Oxford Crown Court. Suffering a severe psychotic episode, he believed his mother had become a demon and killed her and gouged out her eyes during a walk at Watlington Hill on October 23, 2020. The day of the killing, he woke up between 10am and 11am and smoked a small amount of cannabis 'through a hollowed out potato'. Witnesses saw him behaving erratically afterward, including biting off a chicken's head, climbing a pylon, and telling strangers he'd "fallen from the sky". Experts agreed he was deeply psychotic, with delusions of being a god or shaman. Psychiatric evidence confirmed he did not understand his actions were wrong. The jury, after over two hours of deliberation, accepted the insanity defence. Wright's deteriorating mental health had been evident for years prior to the killing. Angela, a community service officer and mum-of-five, is still fighting for answers, furious that her uncle's killer was reportedly never reprimanded for her cannabis use, despite allegedly having it on hospital grounds. 'Despite evidence showing the detrimental impact it has on mental health, I cannot see any evidence that anything is done to help mental health patients stop taking it,' she said. 'Borowy was refusing to take her own anti-psychotic medication and self-medicating instead, with disastrous consequences.' Borowy was sectioned in October 2022 for sacrificing two goats she stole from a farm in a witchcraft ceremony. One time she escaped she told police she would murder hundreds of people and had threatened a 'bloodbath'. She was also often found with knives. Tragically, after being granted supervised leave on August 7, Borowy ran off from the healthcare worker accompanying her and travelled to Sheffield where she killed Roger Leadbeater two days later. Angela is now incredibly wary of being around anyone she suspects is using cannabis. 'I went to a 90s festival just last month and I had to leave because the smell of cannabis in the air was too much for me,' she said. 'I didn't feel safe and I was scared of what it could do to the people smoking it. They could be a walking timebomb. 'I know what happened to Roger is rare, but he is proof that it can happen - and the reality is that cannabis is not rare. 'The problem with a murder caused by cannabis is that they are so tied up with mental health that the cannabis side of it gets forgotten. More needs to be done about prevention. 'Sadiq Khan needs to take a walk in our shoes for a week to see what he thinks of cannabis use then.' A spokesperson from the Home Office said: "We are continuing to work with partners across health, policing and wider public services to drive down drug use, ensure more people receive timely treatment and support, and make our streets and communities safer." 17 17

‘Dad, I love you. Pray for me': the preventable death of Nimroy Hendricks, stabbed in the heart by a 14-year-old
‘Dad, I love you. Pray for me': the preventable death of Nimroy Hendricks, stabbed in the heart by a 14-year-old

The Guardian

time11 hours ago

  • The Guardian

‘Dad, I love you. Pray for me': the preventable death of Nimroy Hendricks, stabbed in the heart by a 14-year-old

In October 2020, Nimroy Hendricks was struggling to manage a situation that was spiralling out of control. He was 24, his girlfriend was 32, and her daughter, Rhianna (not her real name), was a violent and troubled 14-year-old. At the start of that year, Rhianna had stabbed her mother and set fire to a room in their home, been briefly detained, then returned to live with her. Now she was again threatening to stab her mum. Hendricks was desperate to protect his girlfriend, who he had been with for six months. 'I knew it was getting really bad for Nim,' says his father, also called Nimroy Hendricks. 'He couldn't handle the situation but he felt he couldn't leave his girlfriend because he was worried Rhianna might kill her. The mother was afraid of her daughter. She had reported her daughter's threats to police and social services, but Rhianna remained living with her. 'The last time I saw Nim, we sat on the stairs just talking. He told me how bad the situation was with Rhianna. He said: 'Dad, they're not helping her.' Then he gave me a hug and held me tightly and said: 'Dad, I love you. Pray for me.'' On 27 October, Hendricks went to his girlfriend's home in Crawley, West Sussex, to collect a few things. When he arrived, he saw Rhianna had smashed things up in the flat, and told her off, phoning her mother to tell her what had happened. Then he left. Rhianna was furious. As Hendricks walked down the street with his headphones on, she pursued him with a knife. She shouted that she was going to stab him, then plunged the knife through his heart. Rhianna was convicted of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility at Bristol crown court in July 2021. Medical experts identified 'a significant abnormality of mind' at the time of the killing. She received a sentence of nine years – five in custody, followed by four on extended licence. During the court proceedings she acknowledged Hendricks had been a positive and supportive influence and 'like a brother' to her. After the trial, detective chief inspector Andy Wolstenholme described Hendricks as 'peaceful, selfless and caring'. On 18 July, almost five years after the stabbing, the inquest into Hendricks' death concluded. Penelope Schofield, senior coroner for West Sussex, Brighton and Hove, ruled that his death was due to unlawful killing and that the police and social services had each missed an opportunity to intervene shortly beforehand. 'It is possible that had these matters been addressed the perpetrator may not have been in a position to carry out the act which led to Mr Hendricks' death,' she said. 'The issue with this case was that nobody saw the risk to Nim.' 'Everyone was at risk from this girl,' his mother, Lisa, said afterwards. 'Her mother, police officers, social workers – and Nim. But it was as if Nim was an invisible person.' Hendricks was adored by his parents. Lisa describes him as 'a sweet plum'. She is an artist who previously taught art to prisoners, and Nimroy Hendricks Sr is a musician and decorator. Nimroy and his dad wrote and performed music together and joined forces on decorating jobs. 'When I think of Nim,' says Lisa, 'I think of him in the water in Jamaica, free and happy during days out on the beach when he was swimming, snorkelling, jumping the waves and smiling, showing his missing teeth with his soft curly hair full of sand.' 'We have not just lost our son,' Lisa and Nimroy said at the inquest. 'We have lost our best friend. There is no way to describe the unbearable pain of life without him.' The day before Hendricks died, Rhianna's mother had reported her missing to the police. She was well known to them. When Rhianna was found in the early hours of 27 October, just hours before killing Hendricks, the police agreed, after some deliberation, that she could go and stay with an 18-year-old girl she described as her 'cousin', but who was not in fact a relative and did not live at the address she had provided to the police. Hendricks' parents believe that had Rhianna been taken into protective custody that night their son would still be alive. An earlier report into the actions of Sussex police by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, however, did not identify any failings. It was only after Hendricks' death that a fuller picture emerged of Rhianna's background. Rhianna's mother became pregnant with her when she was 17. She was subjected to domestic violence while she was pregnant, which experts believe impacted her daughter in the womb. According to a 2023 review into the events leading up to Hendricks' killing, Rhianna told professionals she had to look after herself at times even when she was a toddler. She displayed violent and aggressive behaviour from the age of six, and at eight she was permanently excluded from her third primary school, after numerous episodes of restraint and fixed-term exclusions. Referrals to the child and adolescent mental health services were made, but rejected, because she did not 'meet the threshold'. In 2017, when she was 10, she told professionals she had smothered her three-year-old half-brother in a rage. He survived. In June 2019, when she was 13, she was the victim of a serious attack. Around the same time, she was linked to county lines drug gangs. She was diagnosed with PTSD, mild learning difficulties and conduct disorder, and possibly also ADHD. A psychological assessment when she was 13 found she was functioning as an eight- or nine-year-old. When asked about her safe places and who had protected her as a child, she was unable to name any person or place. The 2023 review concluded 'there was a failure of the system as a whole' in relation to Rhianna and that 'the systems in place to protect such vulnerable children are ineffectual'. It found that those supposed to be supporting Rhianna demonstrated a lack of professional curiosity and critical thinking. It also identified 'adultification bias', whereby adults perceive black children like Rhianna to be older than they are and fail to treat them in an age-appropriate way. 'I honestly think part of the failings were due to the fact that she is black and Nimroy was black,' says Lisa. 'They were doing lots of things, but none of them were joined up and none of them worked.' A common thread in reviews into violent deaths is that opportunities to intervene were missed and communication between agencies was deficient. In Rhianna's case there were so many plans – multi-agency support plans, education and healthcare plans, children-in-need plans and child protection plans – and all of them failed. The thousands of pages of notes written about her by various professionals could not save Hendricks' life. The number of agencies that intervened may even have had a negative impact on Rhianna's wellbeing. The review stated that Rhianna 'was known to be overwhelmed by the number of services and professionals involved'. It added: 'There is little evidence that, despite significant input and undoubted time and effort, partnership intervention had any positive effect over [Rhianna's] lifetime.' According to Dr Elie Godsi, a consultant clinical psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society, women and girls commit about 10% of all violent acts. 'This is almost exclusively due to multiple childhood adversity and trauma … in particular, interpersonal violence, substance misuse, mental health problems and self-harm,' he says. 'If you have been a powerless victim, one way of taking back control and power is through being violent. When you have a child with that much trauma, they can't regulate their emotions or behaviour and any kind of conflict is magnified.' In March, Susannah Hancock's review of girls detained after criminal offences in England and Wales recommended they should no longer be placed in young offender institutions due to the 'complex mental and physical health issues' they often face. Instead, they should be placed in secure schools or secure children's homes. At the time of the review, just 10 girls were being held across England and Wales. It found that offending in this group of girls was 'closely linked to exposure to multiple, traumatic events'. Most girls who commit violent offences are found to have suffered abuse from a very young age or even while still in the womb. At the time the relationship between Hendricks and Rhianna's mother began, Rhianna had just been released from child detention on licence after the stabbing and fire-setting incidents. 'Nim told me how beautiful it was to see them reunited,' says Lisa. 'Rhianna was learning to ride a bicycle and Nim was a loving and big-hearted presence there.' But Rhianna was prone to bouts of extreme anger and couldn't be talked down when her rage descended. In the days before she killed Hendricks, Rhianna's anger had been triggered by her mother leaving their home in Crawley to travel to Birmingham, so she could care for her dying mother. She had returned to Crawley the day before Rhianna killed Hendricks, but was fearful of going back to their home because of the threat from her daughter. Instead, she stayed with Hendricks. Killings by children are extremely rare; killing by girls even more so. But police, social services, schools and youth justice teams need to recognise that children can commit domestic violence as well as be the victims of it, says Lisa. 'These children need to be considered as perpetrators in order that those subjected to this domestic violence are given the protection they deserve. These children, who are so obviously troubled, deserve proper care and therapeutic interventions. If the state does not put in place the structures to help children who [might] kill, we are in increasingly dangerous territory.' Hendricks' parents are not out for revenge. 'I forgave Rhianna straight away when I read about all the things she has been through,' says Hendricks Sr. 'Everyone failed her.' He constantly replays the weeks before Rhianna killed his son. 'It was terrible to see someone that young with no protection. They should have kept a close eye on her. She needed help, but they didn't look after her. I go and sit at Nim's graveside and think about how he would still be alive if things had been done differently.' He is also haunted by the police's refusal to let him see his son after Rhianna stabbed him. When he got the news, he rushed to the scene. 'All I wanted was to see my son. My heart was racing. But the police escorted me away. There was a partition separating me from him. I was told by police I should not stay there. I said, 'I can't go – this is my son.'' 'The system is completely broken,' Lisa says, 'and we have paid the highest price for that.' Like Lisa, Hendricks Sr is calling for a fundamental change in the way dangerous and troubled children are managed. 'When people have mental health problems, they need to be kept in a safe place,' he says. 'I don't think prison is the right place for girls like her and I would never want her to be there. She needs to be put into a therapeutic environment where she is safe and can get the care she needs to heal.' 'Losing Nim is a daily event – it never leaves me,' says Lisa. 'A huge part of me left when he was killed. I am not the same person. It has been harrowing to lose him to the hand of a child. Nim was a beautiful soul, a kind, imperfect, handsome, funny, wise-for-his-years and talented young man. He was an absolute joy and deserved 100% better.' 'Nim and I were so close and I have to continue living with this. I feel so lonely,' says Hendricks Sr. 'All my son was trying to do was help a girl who needed help.'

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