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BRIAN DEER on JUSTIN FASHANU Page 4


The defendant's background might have softened the judge's heart, but whatever the mitigation that might lie in the past, if Fashanu had lived to return to the United States, he would almost certainly have gone to jail. Maryland shares the obsolete "sodomy" laws of many Southern states, under which even oral sex between husband and wife is technically a felony offence. And Case was preparing to upgrade the charges to first degree sexual assault.

But Fashanu evaded the scruitiny of a trial, such was the tragic aspect of his death that his reputation has been subtly enhanced. On Friday May 8, a British newspaper was leaked an excerpt from his suicide note and ran a story sympathetically, headlined: "Boy lover blackmailed me." A month later, a Channel 5 documentary lauded his soccer career. And on Tuesday June 23 - three months after that fateful night in the Ashton Woods apartment - gay activists held a "memorial tribute" in London, dubbing him "a victim of racism and homophobia".

His brother was approached to cast light on his bereavement, but stood mute in the face of questions. Rejecting an interview request, John Fashanu's agent Ian Wilson said: "One, he doesn't particularly want to do anything at the moment. Two, if he does, he will do it in his own way, and his own feelings would be his own property, and he would either have those within a book, or within a major newspaper thing which he was in control of. Why give - this is my view - somebody else all that material? Why?"

Yet despite his death, Justin Fashanu will get a hearing, although not on any criminal charge. In the next few weeks - the date is yet to be fixed - Poplar Coroner's Court, a redbrick Tudor-style corner house in east London, will be the scene of a short trial of his fate. The coroner will probe the circumstances of his death and of the events which led to the garage. The only thing so far known about the hours beforehand was that he was seen at a gay sauna called Chariot's, near Liverpool Street, almost opposite where his body was found.

DJ and his mother will not go to the hearing, but they anxiously await the results. They suspect the kid was incapacitated in the apartment with one of a number of "date rape" drugs which are increasingly involved in sexual assaults. One candidate is Rohypnol, another GHB, and there are also sedatives, such as Valium, under suspicion. Tests on the boy were delayed at the hospital, so his system would have cleared any trace. But such were the circumstances of Fashanu's hanging that they wonder if he had a supply in London and perhaps consumed some to steel himself for death.

The kid's parents also hope that the coroner's hearing will help DJ reach a sense of closure. For DJ himself, too much is unresolved. He still wants to know the reason why. The family have since moved from Howard County, although he still visits with Laura and Josh. He says that he's okay, but others don't think so. They say that something, somewhere, is wrong.

The most obvious evidence is that since last spring he has been stalked by night-time terrors.

In a Maryland bedroom, untidy with toppled CDs, crumpled jeans and thrown-down sports gear, a circuit closes, he sits up in his sleep and he lashes out into the dark with his fists.

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