Simone White lived life with such irrepressible energy, that her friends and family say it was hard to keep up.
“She just loved life and used to make the most of every minute,” her mother Sue White told ITV News.
She describes her daughter as “very extroverted, hugely popular – loved to play hard and work hard. She was vibrant, sporty, musical”.
The 28-year-old lawyer from Orpington in Kent also loved to travel.
Simone and her best friend Bethany had been all over the world, and their trip to Cambodia and Laos in November last year was meant to be their next great adventure.
A couple of days into the holiday, Simone’s mother realised she hadn’t heard from her so she sent her a message to check if everything was ok.
“She literally came straight back and said, yeah, it’s the best trip I’ve done, I’m having the time of my life,” Sue told me.
“And that’s the last time I heard from her.”
That evening, Simone, Bethany and another friend went to the bar at the Nana Backpacker’s Hostel where they were staying in Vang Vieng, Laos.
“They told us it would be free whiskey or free vodka shots,” Bethany said.
“We don’t really drink shots, so we were like, okay, we’ll just get mixers.”
She said she watched the bartender pour the shots from a “typical vodka bottle” and then ordered Sprite to mix them with.
Bethany remembers them ordering five or six shots each over the course of two and half hours and said she didn’t notice anything untoward, apart from the fact that the drinks didn’t taste as strong as she would have expected.
“We just felt a bit off”: Simone’s friend, Bethany, describes when they both started to feel unwell
“I just felt that I should have felt (the effect of the alcohol) more than I did,” she told me.
It wasn’t until the next day that they started to feel unwell. Bethany recalls waking up at 8.30 am the next morning with what she initially thought was a “mild” hangover.
“We just felt a bit off. I can’t really describe what exactly it was, but it wasn’t like your typical hangover.”
They had booked a swimming excursion but, when they arrived, Bethany said, neither she nor Simone wanted to swim.
She describes feeling tired, lethargic, and “heavy”.
“Just not really being able to move the muscles that you want to move when you want to move them.”
When it came to kayaking, Bethany described how she and Simone could only “lay on the back of the kayaks,” while someone else had to paddle for them.
When Simone started being sick, and Bethany fainted, their friend suggested they should all go to a hospital.
More than 24 hours after consuming the poisonous drinks, Bethany said Simone’s condition was deteriorating rapidly
Bethany said that when they arrived, staff at the public hospital in Vientiane initially wrongly suspected either food poisoning or drugs. All three were given treatment, but by this time Simone’s condition was deteriorating rapidly.
“Her breathing started to change, she wasn’t able to look at me in the eye, she was just sort of looking into the distance,” Bethany said.
“I just didn’t know what to do.”
The friends made the decision to be transferred to a private hospital but, by the time they arrived there, more than 24 hours after consuming the poisonous drinks, “it was just too late”, said Bethany.
“They just said to me, can you sign these forms? We’ll do all we can to save her life.”
The next morning, Sue woke up to a message from Bethany. It said “I don’t want to worry you, but we’re all in hospital with acidosis.”
It explained that doctors said Simone was showing signs of improvement, but she was still sedated.
Sue booked herself on a flight to Laos so she could be there when her daughter woke up.
“I thought, ‘oh, she’s in a serious condition, but she’ll pull through and, you know, she’ll be in hospital for a few days’.”
But at 2am, the night before she was due to fly, Sue received a phone call from Bethany and one of the hospital doctors, asking her to give permission for Simone to have urgent brain surgery.
“As soon as they said brain surgery, I just knew she wasn’t going to make it. Like mother’s intuition, I just knew.”
Sue then had to endure the 17-hour plane journey to Laos alone, not knowing whether her daughter was alive or dead.
She arrived just as they were wheeling Simone into surgery, but it didn’t go well.
“We were told on the Sunday evening, after the CT scan, that she only had 5% brain power. And then by the Monday it had gone down to zero.
“We knew that she wasn’t going to survive. So, it was just a case of waiting. I just felt sick,” Sue said.
Sue and Bethany sat for days by Simone’s bedside, talking to her, and playing voice notes that had been sent by her friends.
“We just told her how much she was loved and how much she’d be missed hopefully she did hear something.
“I’m so grateful I was there by her bedside”, Sue said, “But it was absolutely soul destroying. Obviously that picture is going to be in my mind forevermore.”
Simone’s mother, Sue, said she was told by doctors that she would have to turn her daughter’s life support off herself
Sue said that doctors eventually explained to her that they couldn’t switch off Simone’s life support for religious reasons. She was told she would have to do it herself.
“It was awful. I had my husband and my son on the end of the phone, but I was in the room on my own.
“I turned the machine off and then 30 seconds later the backup ventilator came into operation. It was just horrific.”
Sue said that happened twice, and that doctors then asked her to remove the breathing tube from her daughter’s mouth.
“I think it probably took an hour for us to actually terminate the ventilator.
“Nothing will ever compare to that, what we all had to go through in that hospital. It was just devastating,” she said.
The reason Sue and Bethany are speaking about what happened to Simone is because they want to stop it from happening to anybody else.
Bethany has started a petition for UK schools to educate children about methanol poisoning, in the same way people are warned about the dangers of drink spiking.
“It’s not something I was taught about at school. None of us knew about it,” she said.
Sue is calling for testing strips to be made widely available at an affordable cost for travellers, so they can test their drinks for methanol before they consume them.
Simone was one of six tourists who died after staying at the Nana Backpacker Hostel, which has since been closed down and it is not known when it will open again.
The hostel owner has previously denied shots given at their bar were responsible for the mass poisoning.
A number of workers were detained but the status of this is unknown. ITV News has approached the Laos authorities but has not heard back.
Sue and Bethany told me that the police investigation in Laos is yet to provide them with any answers. They fear they will never know who was responsible for Simone’s death.
“They’re not releasing any information, no statements or anything,” said Sue.
”I think it’s very unlikely any individual anyway, will be convicted of the crime ever.
“It’s unexplained as to why it affected Simone so much worse than (others), we’ve got no answer to that at all. There’s been a postmortem, we’ve got no results of that. Whether it was her metabolism and she processed it more quickly or differently to the others? We don’t know, but we’ve got no answers at all.”
I asked Sue how Simone would want to be remembered. She paused for a long time.
“She wouldn’t like her death to have been in vain,” she said, finally.
“She just loved life so much. She would have been furious to think her life would have been cut that short.’
A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson told ITV News: “We are supporting the family of a British woman who has died in Laos and we are in contact with the local authorities.”
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