Islington News: Karl Mills | Ujima Court | Hornsey Rise

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Islington Tribune - by CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
Published: 17 October 2008

Family question ruling on drugs death man

Body had three times fatal dose of heroin and cocaine

RELATIVES say questions remain unanswered after a coroner ruled that a man died at his Upper Holloway home from a massive drugs overdose.
Karl Mills, 41, was found dead after relatives who had not heard from him in three weeks alerted police.
Police broke in through a window of his Ujima Court home in Hornsey Rise in January to find him dead on top of the covers of his bed, a cigarette lighter in one hand and crack pipes lying nearby.
He was found with three times the fatal dose of two types of drugs in his system.
Speaking after his inquest yesterday (Thursday), his uncle, Fitz Hoffman, called for a more thorough investigation.
He said his nephew’s death had come as a shock to the family, who were aware that he drank and smoked cannabis. “I know he drank – most people do – but I wasn’t aware he used anything else,” said Mr Hoffman.
The St Pancras coroner read out a pathologist’s report which stated Mr Mills had three times the lethal dose of heroin and three times the lethal dose of crack cocaine in his blood.
But Mr Hoffman does not believe his nephew, a paranoid schizophrenic, was addicted to heroin, or that his death has been fully explained.
He recalled Mr Mills’ love of Queen’s Park Rangers football club and described him as a “tremendous footballer”. Mr Hoffman added: “He was a very bubbly sort of person, a happy-go-lucky Afro-Caribbean lad.”
Coroner Dr Andrew Reid said the pathologist had not found any needle marks on Mr Mills’ body or any drugs in his stomach, leaving only the option that he must have smoked the drugs.
But that conclusion was openly questioned by Mr Hoffman. Quizzing Dr Reid, he said: “It just seems strange to me as a layman that he has so much [drugs] in his blood and it wasn’t ingested and it wasn’t injected.”
Dr Reid said Mr Mills was killed by “mixed drug toxicity” and “died from abuse of drugs in the context of chronic mental illness”.
Mr Hoffman said after the inquest: “The coroner can’t square the fact he had six times the lethal dose of drugs in his body. Logically, if you take one dose of drugs, how can you take another five times? Once you take one lethal dose you’re knocked out.”

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