Friends today paid tribute to a City lawyer who lay undiscovered for 24 hours after falling to his death down a rubbish chute at his own birthday party.
Gary O’Donoghue disappeared during a celebration his friends had thrown for his 29th birthday at an apartment in Shoreditch, east London.
He was last seen at around 6am at the flat in Quaker Street, off Commercial Street in Spitalfields.
Friends hunted for 12 hours before calling police, who found his body at the bottom of the chute several hours later after conducting a search of the building.
Police are treating Mr O’Donoghue’s death as unexplained but at this stage do not believe there to be any suspicious circumstances.
Mr O’Donoghue was a solicitor at EMW Law firm, based in Chancery Lane, where he specialised in corporate finance.
He had worked at the company for more than five years and previously attended Nottingham Law School and took his undergraduate degree in law at the University of East Anglia.
In a testimonial on the firm’s website, he described his passion for his job, saying: “I joined the firm in 2009 as a trainee and have not looked back since.”
Mr O’Donoghue was also a talented footballer, playing for UCL Academicals in the Amateur Football Combination.
Mr O’Donoghue’s family were today too distressed to comment on their son’s death.
Team captain Stuart Richards paid tribute on Facebook saying: “I lost a pal this week - one of my football boys. Twenty-eight years old. Went missing after a birthday night out and then found dead a day later.
“The sadness comes in surreal waves. One minute I’m all punning on him being a left-winger - haha, politics - the next I’m pulling over on the side of the road in tears.
“It’s like a glitch in my day-to-day thought continuum. A state of affairs that despite the very real, conscious acceptance of his death, just doesn’t quite compute when you stop properly reflecting and let things be.
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“I didn’t even know him that well, but he was someone who as skipper I expected to turn up every week. Almost still do. Without exception he’d create a goal or bag himself.
“A month back he smashed a 93rd minute volley - a winner - in off the bar and then dashed towards me, evading aggressively joyous teammates, with that pesky little grin of his. You thought you’d seen pesky - you hadn’t. Gaz’s grin was pesky.”
His friend David Hagan wrote: “I will sorely miss Gaz.”
A Met Police spokesman said: “We were called to Quaker Street on January 25 at 6pm after a man was reported missing. We searched the property and the man’s body was found. We are treating the death as unexplained.”
- An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Gary O’Donoghue had assisted in Jed McCrory’s takeover of Swindon Town in 2013. We apologise for the error.
