What a waste of a life
A shocking picture of dead heroin addict Rachel Whitear has been made public by her parents as part of a drugs awareness programme.
Rachel had been addicted to heroin. When police smashed through the door of her bedsit they found her dead from an overdose.
Her face blackened and bloated, veins tracing the surface of her arms like a cobweb. Her knee is cut open and dried blood from the wound stains the carpet on which she lies huddled.
She had been dead for three days when police broke in and their photographer took this hideous photograph. The syringe that killed her lies by her body.
Devastated by the death of their daughter, Rachel's parents have today asked the Evening Standard to print this picture - in advance of the same tragic image appearing in a hard-hitting anti-drugs video that will be shown to schoolchildren.
The 22-minute video, Rachel's Story, encapsulates the brief life of the 21-year-old student who once had a glittering future.
Rachel's family say she was a beautiful and brilliant girl who fell victim to drug addiction two years before her death and dropped out of Bath University. They want her story to warn other youngsters of how drugs can wreck their lives.
Rachel, from Ledbury, Herefordshire, took her fatal fix on her stepfather Mick Holcroft's birthday, 10 May 2000, in her rented rooms in Exmouth.
The gruelling images taken by Devon police are included at the end of the film, which has been produced with Health Department funding by the Herefordshire Healthy Schools Project.
On the video Rachel's stepfather, a leisure centre worker, her mother Pauline, who works in a care home, her sister Sarah and best friend Polly North tell of her happy childhood.
Rachel excelled as a pianist and left school with 10 GCSEs. She gave time generously to her friends and took part in sponsored walks and swims. She was the last person anyone would have expected to become a hopeless drug addict, say the family.
Mr Holcroft said: "This video is to make people think. There will be a point when someone says to a youngster 'try that'. They will then be put into a situation where when they also try other things."
Her mother said a heroin addict boyfriend had started Rachel on the downward path. "Our lives will never be the same without her. There is always going to be a gap," she said.
Can this picture stop any heroin deaths?
