An Ilford pensioner who died one day after he was found living in squalor had “given up on life”, a friend has told a coroner.
Michael Horn, 78, was transported to King George Hospital in January after being found at home with sepsis – a deadly infection – in his chest.
He was placed on a ventilator but died the next day.
When friend Malcolm Jarvis entered his Kingston Road home to look for his will, he wrote in a statement: “I was shocked to find that that his house was in a state of total disrepair.”
There was water leaking through the roof and “evidence of a rat infestation”, he said.
“My impression of this good friend was that he had given up on life,” he wrote.
Senior coroner Graeme Irvine read Mr Jarvis’s evidence aloud at an inquest on Tuesday, July 8, at East London Coroner’s Court.
The statement said the men met in 2009 at the Healing Hearts bereavement group, which Mr Horn joined after the 2008 death of his wife Joan.
He was “very distressed”, Mr Jarvis recalled, but the group “became his main interest and he met friends there”.
It “helped him come to terms with his grief”.
But in the last 18 months or so of his life, the court heard Mr Horn’s condition “dramatically” worsened, including his “appearance and general cleanliness”.
“He was very defensive of anybody entering his house,” he said.
In December 2024, Mr Horn collapsed at one of the group’s meetings and was taken to hospital by ambulance, but “flatly refused” an at-home occupational health assessment.
When friends took him home after he was discharged, “he would not let us any further than his front gate,” Mr Jarvis said.
Weeks later, when friends couldn’t reach him, paramedics conducted a welfare check and found Mr Horn “half-sitting, half-laying on the sofa” with “reduced consciousness”.
He had low oxygen saturation, a high heart rate, an irregular pulse, very low blood pressure and a low temperature.
He died the following day from multi-organ failure, caused by septic shock, caused by community-acquired pneumonia.
Mr Irvine ruled: “Mr Horn’s death was caused by natural causes, contributed to by self-neglect.”
He found no evidence of neglect by any public service, noting that Mr Horn had refused offers of assistance.
“He will be greatly missed,” Mr Jarvis’s statement read.
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