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14th July 2023
06:44am BST
A husband found his wife frozen to death outside their house - after she fell coming home from the pub.
Andy White and wife Naomi had drinking together but he went home early as he was going on holiday the next morning.
An inquest heard how Naomi, 50, had been accompanied home by a friend on March 4 but had fallen outside their home, in Maidstone, Kent, after the friend left.
Andy, 60, woke up in the early hours of the night to find the front door of their home open, with his wife outside.
Paramedics were called and attempted CPR, but there was nothing that could be done. Naomi died of hyperthermia.
Andy has now paid tribute to his wife, describing her as a "lovely person" who was "well known and well-liked" by everyone.
He said: "She would talk to anyone. She had lots of friends and made friends easily.
"If you walked into a pub as a stranger she would talk to you and make you welcome.
"She was a lovely person. Naomi knew everyone – she was one of those people.
"She'd spent her whole youth from 15 or 16 in pubs and pool teams. She was well-known and well-liked.
"The main thing is she was a lovely woman and she’s left a huge hole in a lot of people’s hearts."
The couple met at Naomi's sister's wedding in 1998 before tying the knot in 2003, and had enjoyed ski trips, nights out and music events over the years.
Naomi had injured her knee on a previous ski trip and decided to not go on the one that Andy had planned, although he had tried to convince her to come.
Andy said this has left things constantly "going through his head" because if she had gone on the trip, then she "would have gone home with me."
“I said ‘Naomi we've booked a chalet now, it's there, just come'," he recalled.
"If she'd come along, she would have gone home with me – but it's back to ifs and buts.
"Things start going through your head. I'm lying upstairs while she's lying out in the garden freezing to death.
"If I'd woken up an hour earlier, every day a million things go racing through your head.
“It's very hard. I've lost family - my mum and my dad, everyone has lost people, but when you actually lose your partner it's hard.
"When you've spent 25 years together, it's like a big void. It’s like - what now?"
Coroner Catherine Wood recorded Naomi’s cause of death as hypothermia caused by alcohol intoxication.
Wood said she had heard nothing to suggest the death was anything other than an accident.
She added she has "heard evidence she was intoxicated and required assistance walking home, required a friend to open the door, and the fact she was seen falling on CCTV footage, and that the pathologist considered she was intoxicated."
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