A woman has described the moment she found her future husband dead after a prank went horribly wrong.

Michelle Delahunty-Evans said she and fiance Philip Burns, 36, had been messing around trying to scare one another after watching American Horror Story.

They went for a night out together on February 28 and were ‘joking around, being silly’.

But then she turned around at their home in Carlisle, Cumbria, and saw him hanging from the back of the living room door.

She ran into the street and screamed for help but nothing could be done to save him.

Coroner Dr Nicholas Shaw said: ‘Philip has no mental health history, no history of self-harm. He had been out for a night out and seems to have had a good time.

‘People don’t generally take their lives when people are in the same room at the same time. I find it hard to believe he has taken his own life.

‘I’m more inclined to think that because they were playing around, I suspect this is something he has done that has gone wrong.

‘No one will know. Philip can’t talk to us from the grave. I think it’s more likely than not he was mucking around and something went wrong.’

A statement read out from Philip’s mother, Andrea McGrath, said the loss of her son had ‘completely broken her heart’.

Mr Burns had been released from prison in February 2020 after being convicted of assault on a child. He had ‘found a job he loved’ as a dry lining operative.

Ms McGrath said he had been in a better place than he had been in a long time.

Dr Shaw concluded that Mr Burns died by misadventure, with a medical cause of death as hanging.

Source: Read Full Article