The day my brother fell to Earth

In 2001, a young man's body was foundina London car park. Police thought he had tried to enter the UK by hiding inaplane’s landing gear. Reporter Esther Addley traced his tragic story. Two decades later, the man’s brother emailed, asking to meet her

- Esther Addley

Twenty-three years ago, on a bright early June morning in south-west London, a staff member on her way to work at the Richmond branch of Homebase came across the body of a man who had died in the most brutal and traumatic manner. His body was lying on the tarmac just inside the DIY superstore's car park, a tangle of broken limbs in black jeans and a black T-shirt. His skull had smashed.

It was shortly before 7am, and the area was hastily screened off as a possible murder scene. But when DCI Sue Hill arrived at the car park, she knew instantly what had happened. Richmond is a few miles east of Heathrow airport and sits beneath a constant procession of jets making their final, screaming approach to land, just at the point where they lower their wheels. The man had fallen from a plane. The detective and her small team soon identified the aircraft in question: a British Airways Boeing 777 that had taken off from Bahrain the night before. The man must have squeezed into a gap above the tyres, hoping he could hold on and survive the flight. But aircraft wheel bays are unpressurised and at 11,000 metres the external temperature is -50C, with very little oxygen. He was certainly unconscious, and very possibly already dead, by the time he was tipped out of the aircraft and fell half a mile to the ground, hitting the tarmac at nearly 200km/h.

The dead man was carrying no ID and had only a small scrap of paper in his pocket, on which were scribbled some numbers. His body was broken beyond recognition. "It was harrowing," Hill said at the time. "I sat in the Homebase car park and thought: 'This is someone's son. What a bloody awful way to go.""