Father hears details of son’s Callum Brosnan’s drug death

There was no comfort for Cornelius Brosnan as he sat through the harrowing evidence on his son’s last few hours of life.

Callum Brosnan took up to nine MDMA capsules at a Sydney music festival before he died. Picture: Supplied/AAP

There was no comfort for Cornelius Brosnan yesterday as he sat through the harrowing evidence on his 19-year-old son Callum’s last few hours of life.

“It’s very distressing, that’s my boy they are talking about,’’ Mr Brosnan explains.

The grief-stricken father is determin­ed to follow every terrify­ing detail — from his son’s giddy, drug-induced euphoria at a NSW dance music festival in Decem­ber to his final collapse.

“If I could turn back time and bring him back I would, I would,” Mr Brosnan said. “I have funny dreams. Kids do silly things.”

Brosnan’s death is one of six fatal overdoses from the party drug MDMA at NSW dance music festivals now being investig­ated by the state’s Deputy Coroner, Harriet Grahame.

The inquest heard yesterday that Brosnan had taken at least nine capsules of MDMA or “pingers’’ over five hours at the Knockout Games of Destiny, at the Sydney Showgrounds, last Decem­ber 8.

After a night of non-stop “dancing and singing”, a friend noticed Brosnan was suddenly “just standing there, looking blank and staring at the stage”.

Brosnan’s 21-year-old friend, whose name has been suppressed, told the inquest yesterday he’d asked him if he wanted to go to the festival medical tent, but Brosnan had refused, insisting: “I’ll just push through it.’’

“He said he was just going to keep a strong mind … he thought he would get through it by staying calm,” the friend said.

The inquest heard Brosnan’s condition quickly deteriorated as he and his friends walked with other festival revellers to Sydney Olympic Park train station.

By the time they got there, about 12.30am, Brosnan was “stumbling” and talking incoherently to “random strangers’’. He then collapsed on the train platform, his eyes rolled back and flickering as he slipped in and out of consciousness.

An ambulance officer who tried to treat him on the platform said by the time he arrived, about 12.45am, Brosnan’s jaw was locked, his temperature was 41.9C and he was having violent seiz­ures, frothing at the mouth.

As he was loaded into an ambulance 15 minutes later, Brosnan went into cardiac arrest. Despite desperate efforts to revive him, he was pronounced dead at Concord Hospital at 4.23am.

The inquest was told his parents had no idea their son used drugs. But according to his friends the talented young musician — who had won a place at the Sydney­ Conservatorium — had been using MDMA since Year 9.

Brosnan’s friends said he took MDMA every second weekend, regularly using between five and 10 capsules in a day. He also liked to mix it with other drugs, such as cocaine, which was also found in his system, at lethally high levels.

Brosnan’s friend told the inquest­ that until the death no one in his social circle had any real knowledge of the risks ­involved in taking MDMA.

He said the only drug educa­tion he and his friends had at school had been a “just don’t do it” message.

Since Brosnan’s death, he said: “I don’t think anyone is really doing anything any more.”