The role of bookmakers, their shops and inducements to place bets will be considered as part of an inquest into the 2021 death of a 40-year-old man from Addiscombe.
Gambling concern: Gareth Evans
The inquest began yesterday at Croydon’s Coroner’s Court in Davis House.
Gareth Evans was found dead in his flat in Morland Road on November 3, 2021. He had left a note to his family reflecting that he had taken his own life due to gambling.
HM Assistant Coroner Adela Williams ruled that the inquest should investigate the potential contribution of gambling to Evans’s death and whether more should have been done to restrict his gambling in the period leading up to his death.
In the period of around six months leading up to Evans’s death, his bank statements show cash withdrawals of more than £35,000, many of which were made from a cash machine at a fried chicken shop next door to a William Hill’s Cherry Orchard Road branch, a short walk from his home.
The inquest, which is expected to last two days, was due to will hear evidence from witnesses for William Hill, the Gambling Commission and Evans’s family.
Gareth Evans’s family is represented at the inquest by lawyers from Leigh Day and Matrix Chambers. They have received support since the tragedy by charity Gambling With Lives.
Gareth Evans had long-standing problems with gambling going back around 10 years. He gambled online until November 2020, when he self-excluded from online gambling with all licensed operators via GAMSTOP in November 2020.
“He is understood to have resumed gambling in William Hill betting shops in around April 2021,” a statement from Leigh Day said.
In the weeks before he died, Evans exchanged emails with solicitors about a potential claim against William Hill, stating that he felt the operator had failed to intervene in his gambling both online and in-store, and had prompted him to continue gambling by providing inducements.
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One of the cases heard when I was on jury service many years ago was that of a person who worked as a sales assistant in a shoe shop next door to a bookmaker. They were accused of stealing several thousand pounds from the bookmaker, an ironic action and an amount almost exactly equal to the massive debt they had allowed them to build up, in full knowledge of their employment situation and likely income. I thought that the bookmaker was at least as responsible for that debt as the gambler and that it should have been possible to mitigate the verdict with that consideration in mind. The law did not allow that and anyway, I was in a minority of one.
So far as I am concerned, and despite my local conservation group having benefited from a National Lottery grant, gambling, including even the lottery, is fundamentally evil.
It is the purest expression of taking from the many to benefit the few, the direct contradiction of a socialist principle of the redistribution of wealth against the inbuilt systemic mechanism of accumulation by the few. As expressed in those lyrics ”Those that have shall get, those that have not shall lose, so the bible says, and it still is news”…