A highly successful lawyer failing to cope with the onset of Parkinson's disease walked into a hospital, took the lift to the fifth floor and jumped to his death in the stairwell.

Solicitor Roman Voronin, 52, hatched the plan to kill himself but did not speak to anyone at the hospital and did not leave a suicide note.

Details of his fall down the central staircase at the John Radcliffe Hospital were revealed at an inquest held in Oxford yesterday (June 8).

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The Oxfordshire coroner Darren Salter heard that Russian-born Mr Voronin was seen on CCTV entering the hospital at around 2.30pm on October 1 last year, despite not having an appointment.

He borrowed a wheelchair and went up in the lift, where he then sat and waited for nearly an hour before jumping to his death down the middle of the stairwell.

Within minutes he was pronounced dead by paramedics and police had cordoned off the area.

Mr Salter read statements from his ex-wife, his GP and police officers who looked at the CCTV camera footage from the time.

The ex-wife, who now lives in Gibraltar, said: “He was super-intelligent. Knowing what I know now as a trained psychologist and looking back, I think he was autistic.

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“He was not very social but he was very, very intelligent. He knew about everything. He was an unbelievable person.

“His work meant he was very wealthy in Russia. He was a good lawyer and had a very good moral compass.”

She described him falling over in the shower when he was 34 years old and being left unable to talk or move well. It took four years for doctors to diagnose him with Parkinson’s disease – by which point he had already deteriorated.

The couple moved to England in 2010 but split up seven years later. Unable to look after himself fully, Mr Voronin moved into a care home in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

The manager of the care home told the inquest: “He felt like he could reverse his Parkinson’s from his diet alone. He stopped attending hospital appointments.”

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He had also spoken about struggling with not having a partner to talk to and felt like he was getting “picked on for being Russian” by other people in the home.

A statement from his GP also revealed that Mr Voronin had no known mental health problems but had been living on a very restricted diet to try to curb his Parkinson’s symptoms.

After his death, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust carried out a review which found Mr Voronin did not have a reason to be on hospital premises. 

After considering all the evidence Mr Salter recorded a verdict of suicide.