The body of a young Sydney real estate agent who died mysteriously in Bali last month will arrive home in Australia on Sunday, where his family hopes an autopsy will finally provide some answers.
Charlie Bradley, 28, died a few hours after drinking at a beach club in Canggu on the evening of Sunday April 16.
He left just after midnight and called a taxi to his villa, but somehow ended up outside a medical clinic around 4am, where he collapsed on the road.
"When I opened the door I could see he was having a seizure," said Yeni Wahyuni, a nurse at the 24-hour Bhaktivedanta clinic.
With no doctor available, the clinic had no choice but to turn Mr Bradley away, but by then he was barely alive.
A local taxi driver and two bystanders took Mr Bradley to Siloam hospital, but it was too late.
"He was already dead," said Dani Siswanto, a local "Gojek" driver who helped put Mr Bradley into the taxi and held his head in his lap as they rushed to the hospital.
"I could tell because he wasn't breathing. There was no movement in his chest."
Piecing together clues from CCTV footage
The ABC has seen CCTV footage of Mr Bradley's collapse from a camera above a bar across the road from the clinic.
It shows him falling on the road, getting up and trying to walk, only to collapse again moments later.
Witnesses told police that shortly before Mr Bradley collapsed they had seen him leaving a restaurant 250 metres from the clinic, shaking uncontrollably and repeatedly falling over on the street.
But his sister Beth Bradley says the restaurant checked its CCTV cameras and told her there was no evidence he had been there.
She says nobody seems to know where her brother was in the three hours or more after he left the beach bar until he collapsed, let alone what he had drunk or consumed.
Her family are calling for anyone with information to come forward, particularly one man who they have been told may have footage of Charlie's final moments on his phone.
"No-one has helped to find answers. Everything we know is through myself contacting the people who saw him last and local Aussie business owners over there," she told the ABC.
"Something doesn't seem right.
"It's one thing to be told your brother is dead, but to have no idea why or [be] led to believe people were filming him makes me feel sick."
Mr Bradley's family is desperate to retrace his final moments, and are angry that police have not sought CCTV from the medical clinic or from the bar across the road.
That vision has been supplied by the bar to the family and the Australian consulate, but police said they did not require access to CCTV footage because there is no evidence a crime was committed.
Ms Bradley says she was told that the other bystander who got into the taxi to take her brother to hospital had filmed him in the last minutes before he died.
But when the taxi delivered him to the hospital, the man disappeared.
Police were unable to speak to the bystander, a foreign tourist, but say they are still investigating Mr Bradley's death to establish a timeline of his movements.
"The doctor told us he was brought in by a guy showing a video of Charlie confused and shouting, then he fell down, stood back up and banging his head," Ms Bradley said.
Ms Bradley says friends who were with Charlie at the beach bar have told her no drugs were taken. They were not with him after he left the bar. She says she has never known her brother to take drugs before.
She questions whether her brother may have had his drink spiked with a lethal drug, or unknowingly ingested methanol, a toxic by-product of homemade spirits.
Could a swig of bootleg alcohol have killed Charlie Bradley?
Methanol poisoning usually occurs when homemade alcohol is illegally substituted for vodka and other spirits to boost profits or cut costs.
Experts say victims of methanol poisoning cannot see, smell or taste the substance in their drinks, but within 12 to 24 hours can suffer serious and potentially life-threatening organ damage.
Typically methanol attacks the soft tissues in the body, including the eyes, brain and liver.
Symptoms of poisoning can include vomiting, chest or abdominal pain, hyperventilation and impaired vision.
As little as 10ml of methanol — about 2 teaspoons — can cause blindness, and just 30ml — about a mouthful — can cause brain damage, coma or death.
Ms Bradley says her brother only drank spirits, including cocktails — the drinks most likely to be tainted.
North Kuta's Police Chief Made Prama Setya says there is no evidence that Mr Bradley was a victim of methanol poison.
Bali police asked Mr Bradley's family for permission to carry out an autopsy, but the family declined, saying it would have meant months of waiting for his body to be returned to Australia.
Instead the family expects to have an autopsy done in Adelaide, where they live.
Bali's hidden problem
While Mr Bradley's cause of death remains unclear, a number of foreign tourists have died from methanol poisoning on the island in recent years.
Official estimates are hard to come by — Bali's police chief said he had no data on the number of people who have died or fallen ill from drink poisoning in the area, and the ABC contacted Indonesia's food and drug regulator, but so far has had no response.
Research by the Centre for Indonesian Policy Studies showed that 487 people died in Indonesia from illegal alcohol poisoning, from 2013-2016 alone.
It found that heavy taxes and customs tariffs on alcohol had fuelled the production of "counterfeit alcohol and dangerous mixtures to substitute [for] legally traded alcohol".
"Methanol can be found in moonshine alcohol, if distillers replace ethanol with cheaper methanol to save money and to increase the strength of the product," another report from CIPS states.
"The liquid is poured into bottles of branded alcohol and sold as imported alcohol. This type of counterfeit alcohol is often being consumed by foreign tourists in Bali and Lombok who are unaware of the dangerous contents of their drinks."
Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF), which monitors outbreaks of suspected methanol poisoning through news reports, publications and personal communications, states that over the past two decades, Indonesia had the highest number of reported incidents of methanol poisoning in the world.
In one of the first Indonesian cases that MSF has recorded, several foreigners were among 25 people who died in Bali in 2009. In 2018, at least 62 people were reported to have died after drinking bootleg liquor in West Java.
The Australian government's Smartraveller advice states that cases of drink poisoning have been reported in both Bali and Lombok, and foreign tourists including Australians have died or become seriously ill.
Experts believe most cases remain undocumented.
Last July, a 38-year old British woman died of methanol poisoning in a Bali hospital, after drinking what she thought was normal alcohol.
The coroner overseeing an inquest into her death from Manchester found that knowledge of methanol poisoning among tourists in places like Bali was very low, despite an apparent increase in cases and the "catastrophic consequences" of its consumption.
"The inquest heard evidence that there is a growing problem of methanol being passed off as alcohol for human consumption particularly in places such as Bali. Methanol is used rather than ethanol in spirits aimed at the Western market and sold even through apparently reputable suppliers," Coroner Alison Mutch wrote.
Perth resident Colin Ahearn has been trying to spread awareness of the risks of methanol poisoning through a Facebook page called Just Don't Drink Spirits in Bali.
He set up the campaign in 2013 after his friends' teenage son, Liam Davies, died from methanol poisoning after drinking at a bar in Lombok, the island next to Bali.
Mr Ahearn, who has no medical qualifications, says he is not convinced Mr Bradley died of methanol poisoning, but warns the problem is rife and that most tourists have no idea of the risk they take when they drink spirits or cocktails.
He also fears that authorities in Bali have deliberately kept a lid on reporting cases of methanol poison or drink contamination.
"In the last 12 months roughly three or four different cases have had to go to hospital, who were in contact with me," he said.
The ABC has not independently verified the accounts of the people who contacted Mr Ahearn about methanol poisoning.
A police spokesman, Satake Bayu Setianto, rejected the suggestion that authorities under-report methanol poisoning, telling the ABC that police carry out spot-checks on alcoholic drinks at local venues, and that any suspected methanol contamination death would be investigated.
"We will then investigate the crime scene, conduct an autopsy if the family agrees. If the family has any suspicions on his death, then we hope the family would let us do an autopsy so we would know the cause of death," he told the ABC.
"Police collect all evidence in our investigation process. The autopsy result would be able to tell us whether it was poisoning or something else had caused his death.
"If someone dies and foul play is suspected, then it's better to have an autopsy performed on the body ... We can't have final conclusion of the cause of death only based on what the witnesses saw."
The spokesman asked that anyone with information on any methanol poisoning cases in Bali to report it to police.
