A FACTORY worker who stumbled over a low stone wall after a night out drinking and broke his neck was left to die by three strangers who passed by.
It was a “sad indictment of the times we live in” that Steven Tomlins, 40, was left dying in a freezing alley, a coroner said.
By the time help came, Mr Tomlins had spent more than five hours alone, his body temperature sinking to 25C (77F), about 12C below normal, Alan Crickmore, the Gloucester Coroner, said.
Mr Tomlins was well known in his home town of Coleford in the Forest of Dean. After a night out with family and friends, he tripped over the wall and broke his neck. Minutes later, at about 1am on April 19, two clubbers, Stephen Edwards and Samantha Skipp, were recorded on closed-circuit television spotting his prone body. Mr Tomlins was wearing just a T-shirt and jeans.
Mr Edwards told the inquest: “Samantha went to approach him but I told her not to because I had seen drunks get nasty in that situation.” At 5.30am, Robert Miller, a street cleaner, found Mr Tomlins lying face down. “I didn’t want to disturb him because I thought he might lash out,” he said.
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Only when Suzanne Pearce, a cleaner at the Angel Hotel, the 17th-century coaching inn where Mr Tomlins had spent his final evening, noticed him, did help arrive. He was taken to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital with hypothermia and did not recover.
Dr Andrew Davison, who examined Mr Tomlins’s body, said that had he lived he would probably have suffered paralysis because of damage to the spinal cord.
The coroner said that Mr Tomlins’s mother had told him her son did not go out to drink very often but when he did he made the most of it. “So I’m quite satisfied he fell over the wall because he was unsteady on his feet.” Cause of death was damage to the head and neck, and alcohol toxicity. Recording a verdict of accidental death, the coroner said he would ask the authorities to raise the height of the wall.