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Five young men died from rare synthetic drug cocktail, coroner told
By Erin Pearson
Five young men who died within months of each other were found to have mistakenly consumed a cocktail of synthetic drugs that caused them to act bizarrely, with one falling from a CBD balcony and another suffering a heart attack after running into windows and walls.
Police say they’d never seen the synthetic drug cocktail or its erratic effects, when autopsies found the men – aged 17 to 32 – had consumed the same fatal combination months apart.
Leaked Victoria police memo showing they knew the contents of mislabeled-MDMA. Taken February 2017.Credit:
On Thursday, a coronial inquest heard the cluster was uncovered when 20 people were hospitalised in one weekend in January 2017, after taking what police thought was bad ecstasy in the Chapel Street nightclub precinct, sparking a major police investigation.
One died in front of his girlfriend, another on Christmas Day. The five males, known as Anson, 17, Ilker, 32, Jordan, 22, Jason, 30, and James, 23, didn't know one another but had all consumed the same rare substance in the hours before they died.
Launching a coronial inquest into the deaths on Wednesday, Coroner Paresa Spanos heard harrowing accounts of how the young men all thought they were taking a small dose of the party drug MDMA.
One of the young men sustained "unsurvivable" brain damage while others suffered seizures and cardiac arrests across different parts of Melbourne between July 2016 and January 2017.
Autopsies later found all had a combination of two rare synthetic substances – 25C-NBOMe and 4-Fluoroamphetamine – in their systems.
Toxicology analyst Dimitri Gerostamoulos said novel psychoactive substances were "very potent" and difficult to detect. He said while his lab could now test for 900 types, new varieties were created every week.
“This is not a common combination of drugs, it is rare these two drugs are found together. We have not seen this combination of drugs since,” he said.
“These drugs come and go, by the time we have the capacity to look for them we may never see these drugs again.
“A simple pill test or colour test will not be able to determine what these drugs are. They’re very difficult to detect."
The inquest heard Anson, who worked at his parent's Chinese restaurant, died at the Northern Hospital from brain damage on July 25, 2016. His friends said he began forgetting his name and talking in the third person before suffering a seizure.
Counsel assisting the coroner, Leading Senior Constable Duncan McKenzie, said Ilker, who lived with his parents in Melbourne's north-west, was a known drug user. On December 1, 2016, he visited a friend's house after a chance encounter at a shopping centre. He was rushed to ICU but later died.
Jordan, 22, from Melbourne’s southeast was a popular local footballer and worked for his family's earthmoving business when he died three weeks later.
He'd been out celebrating his work break-up with friends, spending the day on a fishing charter and was planning to go paint-balling and go-karting the following day. That night the group went to a friend’s Narre Warren home where party drugs were consumed.
In a witness statement, one female friend said: “when we walked back in the front door [I] saw Tom standing in the front door just staring at the wall. He was saying strange things about life. We saw that Jordy was pacing up and down the hallway, he appeared agitated and had no shirt on. He just seemed crazy".
He began screaming “get away from me” before charging at a glass window. Others soon arrived and held him down for 20 minutes. When he turned limp, they Googled how to do CPR.
He died at The Alfred hospital on Christmas Day 2016.
An alert posted on Revolver Upstairs' Facebook page in 2017 after a bad batch of ecstasy pills was linked to the death of five males.Credit:
Jason, 30, was of Samoan background and staying in the Port Phillip area with his new girlfriend when he took the same drug on January 13, 2017. In a witness statement read to the court, his girlfriend recalled Jason immediately acted weird, looking at his hands, moaning and yelling while appearing scared.
As he began to lose consciousness she rolled him over and began shaking Jason as his ears, hands and feet turned blue. She attempted CPR before paramedics arrived but Jason died on scene.
The fifth person to die as part of the cluster was James, a 23-year-old British man. His housemates were hosting a party at their city apartment when two people left to buy what they thought was MDMA from a friend on Elizabeth Street on January 14, 2017.
Soon after, people began falling ill and James was seen running around the apartment before falling from a balcony and onto scaffolding in a neighbouring construction site. He died as emergency services tried to reach him. Witnesses later told police James appeared distressed and wanted to call him mum.
The inquest heard that as a result of 20 overdoses at the Chapel Street precinct, drug detectives launched Operation Seadragon and later arrested 10 people involved in the importation and distribution of these substances.
It also sparked widespread debate over pill testing.
The matter will resume at a date to be fixed.