A mother who gave her brain-damaged son a lethal heroin injection to end his suffering told a jury yesterday: “I did it with love in my heart.”
Frances Inglis told the Old Bailey she had had “no choice” but to give 22-year-old Tom a fatal overdose. He had been left in what his mother described as a “living hell” after suffering serious head injuries when he fell out of an ambulance in July 2007.
Two months after the accident she gave him an overdose that stopped his heart. He was revived and she was arrested but she again injected him with heroin the next year and he died.
Mrs Inglis, 57, denies murder and attempted murder.
Earlier the court heard Mrs Inglis, a trainee nurse, described by Sharon Robinson, a neighbour, as a “pillar of the community”.The injury to her son had “wrought a change” in Mrs Inglis.
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Giving evidence, Mrs Inglis said of her son: “I felt he lost his life when he came out of the ambulance. I felt that I was helping, releasing him. The definition of murder is to take someone’s life with malice in your heart. I did it with love in my heart, for Tom, so I don’t see it as murder. I knew what I was doing was against the law.
“I believed it would have been Tom’s choice to have been allowed to die rather than have the intervention to keep him alive.”
She sobbed as she said: “I had no choice — I would have done anything else. It is not that I wanted to do it, I had to. I couldn’t leave my son there.”
It had been suggested that her son’s feeding might be withdrawn if it was decided it was no longer in his best interests to continue it, the court was told. But Mrs Inglis thought that a “very cruel, very painful way” to die. “The only, only thing I could do was what I decided to do,” she said.
Her son still had emotions but could not express them in words, she said.
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On the morning of the incident she had laid out instructions at home for paying the bills and feeding the family dog, knowing she would be arrested.
She went to the Gardens nursing home in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, where her son was being treated. “He was in bed. I told him that I loved him and I took the syringe and injected him and held him and told him everything would be fine.” Mrs Inglis said she was with her son for half an hour before anyone came. “I hoped he had died, he was very peaceful,” she said. She blocked the door with an oxygen cylinder.
Asked what had motivated her, she said: “Just totally, utterly concerned for Tom. I couldn’t leave my child like that.” Mrs Inglis told the court she had started to research her son’s condition on the internet days after his accident.
She described begging staff at Queen’s Hospital in Romford, East London, where he was first treated, to give him relief for his “terrible pain” and the “look of sheer horror” on his face as he suffered fits of sweating and frothing at the mouth.
Mrs Inglis, of Dagenham, who said she visited her son twice a day, was asked by her barrister Sasha Wass, QC, about the “encouraging” prognosis described by the consultant Ragu Vindlacheruvu. He had suggested “that Tom would be running his own business, independent — totally opposed to what everyone else had said,” said the defendant. “All I saw was horror, pain and tragedy,” Mrs Inglis said. She thought heroin would provide a “peaceful death”.
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She tried unsuccessfully to obtain the drug from a neighbour before looking elsewhere. She got syringes from the hospital for the first injection in September 2007.
The trial continues.