FRIENDS of the young Dublin heroin addict, Ms Carol Ann Daly, say she made a tearful phone call to them three hours before she was found dead in her cell yesterday morning.
"She can my sister's house at about half ten and said she wouldn't be able for it in Mountjoy and was very, very upset and distressed," said Ms Daly's flatmate, Ms Renee McGuinness, who was visiting relatives in hospital at the time. "It was the first time she was ever up there in Mountjoy. If I had been there I would have been able to talk to her and try to calm her."
Ms Daly (21) left a note in her cell saying she was taking her own life because of her drug problem and she wanted to be with her son, Reece, who died more than two years ago, aged one week.
At 4 a.m. yesterday a priest and a garda called at Ms McGuinness's flat in Greek Street, in Dublin's north inner city, to tell her that her flatmate had been found hanging in her cell at 1.30.
Friends and neighbours continued to call to the flat in the afternoon with sympathy cards and words of comfort.
Although Ms McGuinness knew Ms Daly was a heroin user, she said she was always very discreet about it and never took heroin in the flat. Ms McGuinness said she did not know Ms Daly had been remanded on bail recently on a shoplifting charge.
"She was a drug user but she hid it very, very well. You see rugs users who just keep talking and talking in riddles but she was the most intelligent person and she always kept her head," she said.
Ms McGuinness described Ms Daly as an independent and quiet woman who loved music and clothes and was popular in the area. "You'd know she was well reared and came from a good background. She had a lovely way about her. She was very refined.
"She was a beautiful girl and she shouldn't have died that way.
They should have helped hem one way or another. I think if they'd have given her even methadone that would have helped her," she said.
Ms Daly came from Swords, Co Dublin, where her parents and teenage brother live. Ms McGuinness said Ms Daly's family had told her they wanted to mourn their daughter's death in private.
Ms Daly had lived with Ms McGuinness and her daughter Joanna (13) for two years. They met through Ms McGuinness's 20 year old son, Daniel. Ms Daly had worked as a secretary in a solicitor's office in Dublin before her son was born, according to Ms McGuinness, but had been unemployed since.
Ms McGuinness said she last saw Ms Daly on Wednesday morning. "She said she was going to St Stephen's Green for a walk and I haven't seen her since. That's the last time I saw that lovely girl."