JuicyLucy
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Thanks
Any medics on the thread? My lay understanding is that a clothed person out in that temperature wouldn't really be at risk of hypothermia. But with sickle cell, I guess it could be very different?
BBC main evening news has just shown an interview with a Richard's mother. She said she does not believe he was suicidal. And also mentioned that if he had a sickle cell crisis, he would become incapacitated to the point of being unable to move.
She also said that he was well capable of turning up at hospital if he felt one coming on
(Sorry, no link as that's from broadcast, not the website)
So many variables, many of which are unknown/unknowable, such as his medical history, his drug regimen, what the ambient temperature at home was, whether he'd had alcohol, exactly what weight his clothing was (it looked thin but could have been microfleece, for instance), wind chill factor on the night he left home, etc. However, all that said, my feeling is that if he had just walked around for a while and then gone home again, he would probably have been fine with some rehydration and pain relief. However, cold water is another matter and if it can be demonstrated that he entered the water voluntarily, then that is the strongest indication yet imo that this was genuinely a suicide, caused by deliberate provocation of sickle cell crisis, triggering a cascade of biochemical changes that will have first caused pain and difficulty moving limbs, then difficulty breathing, followed probably by seizure and stroke.
I am personally still very sceptical, though, that he travelled all the way to an unfamiliar location and then walked an appreciable distance in the pitch black to a particular body of water, when there were others he would have passed along the way, in order to execute such a fundamentally simple plan.