A YOUNG mother who died after taking a lethal dose of drugs was unconscious for hours in a flat before her friends called an ambulance.

Tracy Close, 22, may have been saved if medics had got to her earlier, an inquest heard.

But after taking a combination of heroin and cocaine, she lay in a flat in Brymore Road, Canterbury, for about four hours before the people with her – all heavy drug-users – sought help.

Even her boyfriend sat taking more drugs instead of calling an ambulance.

The inquest heard Miss Close, an unemployed mother-of-three, had probably not taken heroin before the day of her death on December 22, 2004.

She appeared to have been given the drug by someone else as a painkiller after hurting her leg in a car accident the night before.

But the conflicting and inconsistent accounts given by all the major witnesses made it almost impossible to determine what really happened, the coroner Rebecca Cobb was told.

Miss Close, her boyfriend Shane Beeching and their friend Maria Scamp had gone to buy drugs in Peckham, London, when they were involved in the accident.

The three got a taxi back to the flat in Brymore Road where they were staying.

The inquest heard that either Miss Scamp or Mr Beeching gave Miss Close heroin and cocaine at some point before they arrived home at around 1am or 2am.

She was unconscious by this time and had to be dragged out of the taxi and carried into the flat.

Her friends laid her on the lounge floor and she stayed there until she stopped breathing at about 5.40am, when they called an ambulance.

Miss Close, of Speldhurst Close, Stanhope, Ashford, was taken to Kent & Canterbury Hospital, where she died that morning.

The inquest was adjourned. The rest of the evidence will be heard on a date to be fixed.

Conflicting witness statements and a lack of other evidence meant the case never went to a trial, Det Insp Stephen Kirby told the inquest.

He said: “In all three accounts there was an element of self-preservation and all three have changed their accounts.

“Our three major witnesses are all heavy drug users and I don’t believe their reliability and character evidence would stand the test.

“We favoured the accounts given by Scamp and Bicker but I still don’t believe they are 100 per cent truthful.

“We have to corroborate that with some other form of evidence and we struggled to get that.”

* Ten months after Miss Close’s death the flat in Brymore Road was the first crack house in the city to be closed down in a joint police and council operation.