New Zealand teenager Ross Kimpton, 17, sleepwalked to his death through a London hotel window 15 metres above the ground after a late-night drinking session, a London inquest has been told.
The teenage rugby-player - on a trip with his Howick College's 1st XV - died last September 22, just 48 hours after the team arrived for a school-holiday tour of England and Ireland.
Ross's parents, Murray and Theresa Kimpton, flew to London from their Auckland home to hear coroner Dr Paul Knapman record a verdict of death by misadventure, the Daily Mail reported.
The inquest was told the schoolboy flanker secretly had a late night boozing session with friends before the tragedy: photos taken after the tragedy showed a bin in his room full of empty beer cans.
But the police ruled out murder or suicide and did not believe Ross had climbed out of the window as a prank while drunk.
Alcohol, along with jetlag and being in a foreign country, put the teenager at risk of sleepwalking because he had suffered from it as a child, a sleep expert told the inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court.
Dr Irshaad Ebrahim, a consultant at the London Sleep Centre in Harley Street, said: "Alcohol is a priming factor for sleepwalking. If there is a precipitating event, something such as a loud bang, someone snoring in the room that disturbs someone in deep sleep, that could precipitate a sleepwalking episode.
"The window was open and there could have been a loud noise coming from outside.
"He was in a strange environment, in a different bed in one of the busiest cities in the world. These are factors in sleepwalking."
But the boy was twice over the drink-drive limit, the hearing was told.
Teacher Brett Rossoman, told how he raced out of The London Lodge hotel after hearing a thud and found his "favourite student" lying in a pool of blood at around 1.15am.
"Two of us ran outside. We found him face down. I took a pulse on his wrist and his neck, but I could not find a pulse. There was no breathing."
The teenager was pronounced dead at the scene. A post-mortem examination found his skull had been fractured in three places, but the cause of death was aspiration of gastric contents due to head injury - he suffocated on his own vomit.
Mr Rossoman, who was in charge of the tour, said earlier that evening he had given the 25 boys STG10 ($NZ25.27) each to buy dinner and told them not to drink alcohol.
Later he found 16 of the boys, aged 15 to 18, in Ross's six-bed room, three of them with cans of beer in their hands, breaking the rules of the tour.
He said: "Straight away I gave them a warning. I dealt with them quite severely and told them to go to bed.
"It is my belief that they went to sleep after that."
Mr Rossoman said: "Ross was one of my favourite students. I knew him very well. From what I hear he was not naive as far as alcohol is involved. He used to drink socially."
Murray Kimpton said in a statement read to the inquest that Ross had been looking forward to the trip: "Ross was very keen on rugby and he held fundraising events to obtain the money.
"Ross was happy and pleased to be going on the trip and he had been talking about it a great deal for months."
He thought Ross had grown out of sleepwalking.
Before the inquest, hotel manager John Blandon said it was "unbelievable" that Ross climbed out of the window in his sleep because there were three bars across the window, and he would have had to climb over a desk to access it.
Howick College associate principal Sheryll Ofner maintained at the time that the students were well supervised by teachers on the night of Ross's death.
