Mother found her son dead at home while checking dog cam on holiday
A mum found out her son had died after seeing her dogs behaving oddly while she was thousands of miles away on holiday.
Maryann Taylor had a dog cam set up to check on her two pets, but was concerned to see that they were both going in and out of the kitchen, looking agitated.
She could not see into the kitchen itself, but could feel that something was wrong so asked someone to go and check the house, where she lived with her son Craig.
His friend went over there, and could immediately see that Craig was lying on the floor of the kitchen in Edinburgh.
Maryann said: ‘Police had to break down the window to get to him. He’d been there for hours.’
The death is being treated as unexplained, with officers still investigating.
Maryann, who was in the Dominican Republic in the Carribean at the time, told how she hadn’t checked what was happening at home for a while as she had forgotten her heart medication and was ‘running about trying to find it’.
She said: ‘It wasn’t until teatime that I checked the cameras for the dogs. I could see them coming in and out of the kitchen one by one, kind of swapping places. They were looking at something.’
Craig, who would have turned 31 this month, died in September last year, and since then Maryann says she is traumatised by still living in the property in the Cotlaws area of Kirkliston.
She has been begging the council to find her somewhere else, but feels ‘completely ignored’.
‘The first thing I do in the morning is pass by his empty bedroom,’ she said.
‘The second thing I do is go into the room where he died and was left for all those hours on his own.
‘I’ve got to sit in the lounge, where they broke the window to get access to him.
‘While I’m trapped in this house, I can barely get through a day.’
She has been offered homes she says are unsuitable and has bid on several others, but says she is not getting anywhere and feels suicidal.
‘I’m disabled and I’ve got a heart condition and arthritis. My lifeline is my two dogs, I need a house with a garden for them. I can’t go live in a flat, I can’t go up the stairs and there’s nowhere for the dogs to go.
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‘Edinburgh Council think I’m being inflexible, but I’ve said I’m willing to live in half of the city. Ideally I’d like to be near my family, friends, my carers – in the area I grew up in, but I’ve said I’m happy to go out with that.
‘Last night I came downstairs during the night to get a drink and I kept seeing my son everywhere dead on the floor.’
A GP wrote a letter to the council setting out her longstanding history of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.
It tells how she was ‘extremely close’ with her son, and there has been a ‘severe decline in her mental health and wellbeing’ after his death.
The letter says: ‘She is unable to go into the kitchen to cook, clean or carry out housekeeping without flashbacks and distress. She feels unable to process her grief whilst living in the home.’
Her MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton said her case was ‘one of the hardest and most tragic I’ve dealt with’ and said he was working ‘to try to get an urgent relocation for her’, though the city’s housing crisis makes appropriate property scarce.
Edinburgh Council said they are ‘aware of the situation and working with Maryann to find a solution’.
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