Names and faces

Heroin likely played a role in the death of British model and television personality Peaches Geldof, authorities said Thursday. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Fotheringham of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate told an inquest into the death of the second daughter of Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof that a post-mortem examination was inconclusive, prompting further tests. In a brief hearing, Fotheringham said the results on the 25-year-old confirmed the presence of the drug. “There was recent use of heroin, and the levels identified were likely to have played a role in her death,” he said. Geldof’s husband, Thomas Cohen, found her April 7 after returning home from a visit to his parents’ home. Fotheringham said that even though Geldof had spent much of that weekend alone, she had been in contact with friends and family. The story offers a sad echo of the death of Geldof’s mother, television presenter Paula Yates, who died of a drug overdose in 2000 when her daughter was 11. In her final message on Twitter, Geldof posted a photograph of herself as a toddler next to her mother.

An aspiring rapper who was arrested during a search of Justin Bieber’s mansion pleaded no contest Wednesday to felony possession of Ecstasy and was sentenced to probation and community service. Xavier Domonique Smith, who goes by the name Lil Za, also was ordered into a drug-treatment program and fined $1,000 for breaking a jail telephone while in custody, Los Angeles County district attorney’s office spokesman Ricardo Santiago said. Smith was sentenced to three years of probation, but the felony conviction can be reduced to a misdemeanor if he successfully completes his sentence, which also requires him to pay the sheriff’s office $600 in restitution for the broken phone. Smith, 20, was arrested in January after deputies said they found him with drugs while searching Bieber’s mansion for evidence in an egg-tossing vandalism case. Prosecutors are still considering whether to charge Bieber with vandalism. Detectives found three to four rocks of Ecstasy and 16 pills apiece of Xanax and oxycodone in Smith’s bedroom at Bieber’s house, according to a probation report. Smith told officers he did not use the Ecstasy, but “he gives it to girls because they ‘love it,’” according to the probation report filed Wednesday.