TWO Fife teenagers have died within 48 hours of each other after apparently inhaling lighter fluid or butane gas, it emerged yesterday.
Lee O'Brien, a 16-year-old trainee butcher, of Turner Crescent, Methil, was found dead at his pregnant girlfriend's flat. Days earlier an 18-year-old unidentified student lost his life at his Kirkcaldy home.
Last night, Lee O'Brien's father said he was mounting a campaign against shopkeepers who sold butane gas to young people. Lee had been decorating his girlfriend's flat and had popped out to buy the gas.
John O'Brien, who also plans to ask manufacturers to include a device on a can or tube ensuring they could not be abused, said he believed his son had inhaled the gas because of ''stress and excitement''.
''He had found out that his girlfriend was pregnant and I think that the excitement of that and the stress of a new job at a butcher's in Kirkcaldy was too much,'' he said.
''I had seen him try it once before for relaxation because his friends had done it. I told him to be aware of the dangers but that day he went out and bought a tube and it killed him.''
A senior detective described the deaths last week as a tragic waste of lives which he hoped would act as ''a salutary lesson for others, underlining the crazy risks that are involved in this area of abuse''.
The deaths come not long after two 14-year-old boys in west Fife were reported to the children's panel after they were found inhaling the contents of butane cylinders in Dunfermline.
Weeks before, two schoolgirls in the same area, one aged nine and the other 13, were also reported to have been discovered inhaling solvents from a plastic bag. In other incidents, a youth was burned to death in Kirkcaldy as a result of inhaling petrol fumes while a girl in west Fife was badly burned when petrol she was inhaling ignited.
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