‘His mind was full of thoughts of his new life’

KENNETH Russell was meant to travel to Drogheda last Wednesday to start a new life with his girlfriend.

Instead, because of Cork’s hidden heroin epidemic, his family spent the day putting the 21-year-old in his grave.

“Total shock, that’s what it is,” his first cousin Jacqueline told the Irish Examiner.

The night before his death last Sunday, Kenneth’s family say he was in positive spirits.

He hadn’t injected in weeks and his mind was full of thoughts of his new life away from his hometown.

Hours later he was being carried out of a suspected drug house in Farranree, one of a network run by known dealers who are understood to have connections in Limerick city.

“On the Saturday night Kenneth was on the computer to his girlfriend. He was moving up to be with his girlfriend in Drogheda. On the Saturday night he changed the comment on his Bebo to say ‘I can’t believe it, something good is finally happening to me’.

“He was off it for months, that’s why we can’t understand why he would be at his computer and then be gone. It was obviously them that called him,” said Jacqueline.

After an incident in England, Kenneth spent 18 months in prison where he took up heroin. Two hospitalisations, one for an overdose in April, were warning signs. Then on Sunday the habit took his life.

His family say he would repeatedly look for help from state services, only to be turned away by a system they say doesn’t make sense.

“You have to be clean six weeks and then you get to go to Arbour House. But Jesus if they were clean they wouldn’t need to be going there,” said his sister Esther, one of five siblings.

During Kenneth’s funeral mass his mother Eileen — who has paid “thousands” in drug debts to dealers for her son — publicly vented her anger at those responsible.

She doesn’t understand why those looking for help can’t get it while those who are the problem can walk away free.

Neither can she understand why the State keeps failing the victims it should be protecting.