A teenager died after taking a cocktail of drugs and cough mixture and becoming trapped behind her bed.

Kate McLaughlin was found in her room pinned between her bunk bed and a chest of drawers.

But an inquest was told her family will never know what happened in the final hours of her life.

The 18-year-old Bexhill College pupil was found slumped in her bedroom at about 1.30am on August 1 last year at the family home in Churchill Avenue, Hastings.

An inquest was told that Kate had almost 20 times the usual dosage of cough syrup in her body which, combined with Ecstasy, led to her death.

A post-mortem examination revealed that she had suffocated because of the position she had been lying in. The drugs she had taken meant she was unable to free herself from behind the bed.

Pathologist Dr Ian Hawley was not able to give a time for her death but said it was likely to be hours before she was found.

After the death, police said they were concerned teenagers were mixing cough medicines with illegal drugs as part of a deadly new craze.

The last time anyone heard from Kate, who was hoping to become a forensic scientist, was at 6pm on July 30 when she sent an internet message to a friend.

She had spent the previous night at a house party with friends in Edward Road, Hastings, after going to a gig where she took Ecstasy.

The inquest was told there were rumours that the 18-year-old had gone to a party in Bexhill in the hours before she died.

Friends suggested she had left after complaining of heart palpitations but it is not known how she would have travelled the seven miles back to her home.

It is also not clear how Kate had got the Ecstasy or the cough syrup that she had taken.

The inquest was told that internet messages between two of Kate’s friends hours after her body was found discussed her drug taking.

One friend, writing under the name I Love My Girl, wrote: “I was the one that gave it to her.

“The dose I gave her it was tiny compared to us and the effects wore off by Saturday morning.

“I even went to work after.”

An investigation failed to reveal who the friend was.

Pauleen McLaughlin said her daughter had only begun experimenting with drugs in the months before her death.

She had told her mother a few weeks before her death that she had tried Speed after sleeping for 20 hours after a night out.

East Sussex Coroner Alan Craze recorded a verdict that the teenager died after non-dependent abuse of drugs.