The Only Way is Essex star Jake Hall died from a chest injury caused by broken glass, investigators say. The 35-year-old reality TV star and model suffered head wounds after allegedly turning aggressive and trying to harm himself during a party at a £200-a-night Majorcan villa he was renting.
Details of the Incident
Sources close to the ongoing probe said the worst injury he suffered was a chest wound caused by a shard of glass from a door he crashed into at the property in Santa Margalida in the north of the island early on Wednesday morning. The autopsy was expected to take place in the Majorcan capital Palma, although the results will be sent to an investigating judge and will not be officially released, as is normal in Spain.
One insider stated: "The thorax injury was the one emergency responders at the scene felt was the most traumatic and most likely to have been fatal."
Police Investigation
Police confirmed the death is being treated as accidental. A Civil Guard spokesman said: "There is nothing pointing to it being the result of a crime at this stage." An investigating magistrate in the town of Inca has been sent an initial police report and will receive the autopsy results as they become available.
The results of the post-mortem will yield only partial answers and will be complemented with tests on tissue samples sent to a specialist lab on the Spanish mainland. Those tests will help cement suspicions that Jake was high on drink and drugs when he died. The investigating magistrate will only order the Civil Guard to conduct more inquiries if he suspects any criminality contributed to the star's death.
Witness Accounts
Civil Guard officers are understood to have quizzed several other people at the house where the death occurred, believed to be four men and two women. Their nationalities have not been released. Officers based in Santa Margalida informed HQ around 7:30 am on Wednesday about the discovery of a man's body at the rented property.
Respected local paper Ultima Hora reported a neighbour had heard a group of people talking about drugs the day before the incident. The neighbour said they "hadn't been causing problems" and seemed "relatively normal," though he admitted to being scared by how one group member looked. He claimed he heard them talking in English about buying a property in the area and was woken up a few hours before police arrived. He said: "It must have been around 2 am. I began to hear a very loud noise, as if they were drilling something. I felt the walls vibrate. They stopped after about five minutes and then I fell asleep."
Another neighbour said she hadn't heard anything out of the ordinary and when she walked her dog just after 7 am on Wednesday, she didn't see anything strange. The dead man's body was removed around 1 pm on Wednesday afternoon.
Background
A source close to the probe said in the aftermath: "Witnesses have told investigators he had been out partying all night and decided to carry on the party back at the place he was renting. It appears from what police have been told that he became agitated, possibly from alcohol and other substances he may have consumed, which is something an autopsy will determine, and at one point turned aggressive and tried to harm himself by banging his head against things. Police are still investigating, but it seems like he could have thrown himself against a door with glass in it, breaking it and suffering fatal injuries from the shards that broke off."
Another insider said before it emerged Jake Hall was the dead man: "The hypothesis that he died while self-harming after a possible combination of too much alcohol and possibly drugs is still the one that appears to be the most likely at this stage."
