The poison my lad bought on suicide site is still for sale ... It must be banned

Dad's fury that he was still able to buy lethal substance on vile forum

- BY AIMEE WALSH

The knock on the door came at 5.30am, and it changed David Parfett’s life for ever.

“I looked out and there was a police car outside,” he recalls. “At that moment, I knew.”

What David knew was that his son, Tom - who loved Manchester United, singalongs in the car and his family - had taken his own life at the age of 22.

David had been worried about Tom, who was autistic, lived with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and had been sectioned for talking about suicide.

But the day before he died, in October 2021, Tom had told his dad he was planning to seek help.

“I believed him,” David says. But instead, Tom checked himself into a Premier Inn in Surrey and ingested a lethal poison he had bought from a pro-suicide website.

The substance, which the Mirror is not naming, had come from a company run by Canadian Kenneth Law, 59, who is believed to have sent a total of 1,200 packages to people in 40 countries.

Packaging from Law's website is visible in photos of Tom's hotel room, but Surrey police did not receive the name of the website until a year later.

And, as he investigated his son's final days, David was able to order the poison from various websites.

He says: “I know from my own personal experience having ordered it three times now that it still gets through to people.

“It's a scandal that we're letting people still take their own lives... I first ordered the poison within six or eight weeks of Tom's death.

“And to be clear, this was from a seller in the UK. It wasn't even a seller from abroad.