27-year-old Jorja Watt passed away after she was stripped naked in a police cell, leaving her "traumatized." An inquest heard this months after they discovered her dead body in her friend's house in September.
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Teacher Death Connected To "Traumatizing" Police Incident
Preston Coroner's Court heard that Jorja was "stripped and left naked in a cell" and had been diagnosed beforehand with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder. Just a few weeks before her death, police arrested her on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker.
Maria, Jorja's mother, explained to the court how the cops left her daughter "traumatized." She was also worried it would ruin her daughter's teaching career as she had already studied for six years to become one.
Due to the terrifying incident, Jorja's mental health took a turn for the worse. She started to "self-medicate" by taking prescription medication, as Lancs Live reported. Jorja would often visit her friend Charlie's house in Heysham after self-medicating.
This eventually led to them finding her unresponsive body on September 1 in Charlie's residence. Known as a "free spirit" according to her mother, Jorja had been eager to start her teaching job in Costa Rica before her death.
Charlie was the first to find his friend's unresponsive body lying on the couch and woke up his mom while shouting his friend's name. "I knew something was wrong," Charlie's mother Voirrey Wilde said to the court. "I found her slumped on the sofa. Her lips were blue and she was unresponsive."
The court heard that before Jorja arrived at Charlie's place she had stopped at another friend's house to collect a bag of hers. In a statement to police, a friend of Jorja's said that she had "seen a bottle of liquid" at this person's house and decided to take it.
The post-mortem examination discovered that the young teacher had many different prescription drugs in her system when she passed. Just some of the prescriptions they mentioned were methadone and a heroin substitute.
They ruled her cause of death to be a multi-medication toxicity with her personality disorder being a contributing factor. For now, we know that Lancashire Police received a complaint in March 2024 about the matter. This was according to a spokesperson, and they said the "complaint remains under review by our Professional Standards Department."
