Pizzas galore!

“Our son could not have been more loved and had he felt he could live his life this way he would have been loved just the same but this was his right as a human being, nobody but nobody should judge him or anyone else.”

Her son attended Worcester’s Royal Grammar School and was studying construction engineering management at Loughborough University at the time of the accident. It happened four days after he played for an England students team who beat a French side in Oxford.

Daniel, who played as a hooker, started playing for Worcester RFC mini-juniors and rose through the ranks to play for Worcester Wanderers Colts. He also represented England Under-16s, England Universities and England Students.

Daniel’s uncle Mark Roebuck, who had started The Dan James Trust which has raised nearly £25,000 for spinal research, had written about his condition on its website.

“He dislocated his C6/C7 vertebrae trapping his spinal cord and becoming tetraplegic in a split second,” he wrote. This means that Dan has lost the complete use of his body from the chest down.

“Through his immense courage and determination he has managed to regain a little bit of use in his fingers but unfortunately this appears to be the extent of his recovery.”

Daniel's parents released a statement yesterday afternoon explaining their son's misery. "His death was an extremely sad loss for his family, friends and all those that care for him but no doubt a welcome relief from the ’prison’ he felt his body had become and the day-to-day fear and loathing of his living existence, as a result of which he took his own life," they said.

“This is the last way that the family wanted Dan’s life to end but he was, as those who know him are aware, an intelligent, strong-willed and some say determined young man.

"The family suffered considerably over the last few months and do wish to be left in peace to allow them to grieve appropriately.”

The couple said their son had never come to terms with his much-documented extreme physical incapacity.

“Over the last six months he constantly expressed his wish to die and was determined to achieve this in some way."

More than 100 Britons are claimed to have travelled to Swiss clinic where Daniel died to make use of laws that allow assisted suicide. Most are in the final stages of a terminal illness.

Although assisted suicide is illegal in Britain and carries a sentence of up to 14 years in jail no one has been prosecuted for taking someone to Dignitas. The figure on assisted dying, was released by the clinic at the start of a High Court test challenge to the laws that ban aiding and abetting suicide.

Judgment in the case, brought by multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy, 45, was reserved at London's High Court.

It is the first big challenge to the law on assisted suicide since that brought by Dianne Pretty, who died aged 43 in May 2002 from motor neuron disease. Her effort to change the law so that her husband could help her to end her life was rejected by the House of Lords in November 2001. At the opening of an inquest in Dan’s death last month the circumstances were recorded as: “Deceased travelled to Switzerland with a view to ending his own life. He was admitted to a clinic where he died.”

Detective Inspector Adrian Todd, of West Mercia Police, said: “A report will later be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service and an inquest into the death will take place in due course.”

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