The AFL team Port Adelaide’s CEO Keith Thomas said the players had been to a party where drugs had been ‘freely available’ but didn’t know if the 22-year-old midfielder had been taken any before his fatal fall this weekend, news.com.au writes.
McCarthy had left a luxury nightclub and told a teammate on the phone he was on his way back to their hotel when he walked in to Flamingo Hotel, took a lift to the roof and fell.
“It seems to be at this point in time the evidence suggests he’s jumped off the wall [on the roof] to a palm tree,” Thomas said.
Western Bulldogs runner and Victorian police officer Stuart Bailey, who had spoken to the Clark County coroner’s office to confirm McCarthy’s accident, told news.com.au: “He may have been disorientated at how far the fall was, he’s slipped and he’s fallen to the ground.”
Bailey said there was no CCTV footage of McCarthy from the roof, only of him entering the hotel.
Thomas said McCarthy, who did 21 games and five goals in AFL for his new club Port Adelaide, had called his long-time girlfriend Danielle Smarrelli as he walked home around 4am.
He said: “She said the call went okay. It was a ‘missing you’ sort of phone call but it’s a private matter between them.
“She was however concerned enough, because he was on his own, to make contact with one of the other players … just to try and get him back with the group. That player contacted John who suggested he was on his way back to the hotel.”
Less than 48 hours later the couple had been joking around at an end-of-season ceremony in Adelaide.
Before clinging onto a palm tree and falling, McCarthy walked around in the unused part of the hotel where its founder, the American gangster Bugsy Siegel had lived before he was shot in 1947, AFL journalist Eddie McGuire said at Triple M radio.
Police are investigating in how McCarthy could end up alone on the roof, and go through conversations he’s had earlier, Herald Sun writes.
Image via Getty.
