She said she spent 24 hours picturing his painful death, before another police officer revealed that he had not died like that at all.
Darren Salituri’s mother, Joanne Garnham, told the Guernsey Press that the heartbreaking miscommunication was one of a series of failings by the authorities since her son was found dead at Les Nicolles on Monday morning.
Mrs Garnham requested a visit from the police during Monday after the family had received only the basic details from the prison.
‘It was blunt, and we were told like it was a normal conversation.
‘I told the officer that was probably the one thing I didn’t want to know,’ she said.
‘On Tuesday another officer came to see me and my daughter and we then found out it wasn’t even true.
‘He hadn’t died that way and I was put through the torment of imagining my son dying like that.’
Mrs Garnham was also upset by the way the prison informed her of her son’s death.
A prison chaplain telephoned her nearly two hours after her son was found dead, she said.
‘They didn’t check, and I was on my own,’ she said.
‘I was alone when they told me my son had died. I couldn’t breathe.’
The States said yesterday that independent investigators were being called in to probe the circumstances of Mr Salituri’s death.
Questioned on the prison’s response, Dave Le Ray, director of operations, justice and regulation, said the investigation would be led by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman, a UK-based organisation which identifies lessons to learn when someone dies in custody.
The 39-year-old’s death inundated local social media groups early on Monday.
Another family member had been informed of the death by the authorities, and some prisoners were communicating the news to the outside world.
Mrs Garnham said the news ‘filtered out of the prison walls’ before she was aware of what had happened.
‘I was told by the prison that’s the way they do it. I’m not stupid, the reason they had to do it that way was because it leaked out of that prison so fast, they had to try and recover it.
‘They told me they were under pressure to release it because it got out so quick, but why weren’t they under pressure to tell his mother?
'He told me that it was because they all have phones.’
Some prisoners have access to an in-cell phone facility with restricted numbers they can contact.
Mrs Garnham said she had received an apology from the second police officer, who visited her the following day with the correct information about her son’s death.