Right now Jeni Larmour should be knuckling down to her final year of studies in urban planning and architecture at Newcastle University, a course that is ‘not for the faint-hearted (the university’s words) but in which this brilliant four A* student was expected to excel.
Instead, Jeni, whose young life held so much promise, is buried in a cemetery in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, where there’s a golden butterfly etched onto her headstone.
Jeni did not attend so much as a single lecture in the course she had set her heart on studying after witnessing the ‘heartbreaking’ poverty in the slums of New Delhi on a school trip.
For, within hours of putting her groceries in the fridge at her student halls, this exceptional young woman, who was then 18 and a hardworking, accomplished classical singer, former deputy head girl at her sought-after grammar school and a colour sergeant in the Combined Cadets Force, was found lifeless in a flatmate’s room after taking a lethal combination of ketamine and alcohol on her first night at university.
This week, at an inquest into her shocking death, Newcastle coroner Karen Dilks recorded a verdict of misadventure, ruling the ketamine was supplied to her by ‘another’.
Her mother Sandra sat through the two-day hearing desperately trying to stay strong for her beloved daughter.