She wrote 11 letters in a year revealing how she was verbally abused, saw drug dealing and fights with knives and could not sleep. Coroner raps police and council for ‘outrageous and appalling comments’ about her complaints.
Victim: Suzanne Dow took a drug overdose after warning a council she could not cope living next door to a drug den
A young and gifted university lecturer killed herself after she was terrorised for months by neighbours in a ‘crack den’ council house next door.
Oxford-educated Dr Suzanne Dow, 33, begged her council to evict the family, who even cut her telephone lines so that she could not call for help, but her pleas were met with little interest by the authorities.
She was left terrified after being verbally abused and witnessing fights, knife crime and drug-taking in the street outside the two-bedroom house she owned.
But though she and another neighbour wrote to her local authority 11 times about the tenants, who had been ‘terrorising the street for years’, they failed to act, an inquest heard.
In a final letter, she warned she had reached the ‘limit of my tolerance’ and could no longer sleep.
She died three weeks later in October 2011 after taking an overdose of pills.
Last night, her heartbroken mother Maureen castigated both the council and police for letting down her daughter.
She said: ‘It was going on for such a long time. She made so many complaints but they didn’t do anything to help.
‘The police were as much to blame as the council. They considered her a nuisance.’
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