Police kept Lord Monson's son handcuffed to bed as he lay dying Kenyan police, who arrested him in the early hours of last Saturday for allegedly smoking a cannabis joint, have denied claims that officers at Diani police station assaulted Mr Monson, whose father is Lord Monson, a 12th baron. Mrs Monson, 58, who is divorced from Mr Monson's father, received a call on Saturday to say that her son was "very sick" in the police station and that he would be taken to a local hospital. "I moved heaven and earth to get on a flight, but even by that point my brother had been talking to the doctors and they were saying that everything was all right," she said. But then when I got to the hospital, he had developed breathing problems. I saw his eyelashes flutter just once, probably because he heard my voice, but he was completely unconscious. He was a truly horrible colour. Less than an hour after Mrs Monson arrived at her son's bedside, his condition deteriorated. Something changed with his oxygen, and he suddenly went a very weird colour, red, purple, blue. I knew that was it, and he died in front of me," she said, through tears. To be perfectly honest it was almost a relief because I thought he'd be very seriously brain damaged if they'd managed to bring him around. Mr Monson, who was a contemporary of Pippa Middleton at the £30,000-a-year Marlborough College, moved to live with his mother four years ago at the beachside property her family has owned since 1964. He had recently started a bamboo-growing business and a fish-smoking enterprise with a close friend. Dozens of Mr Monson's friends and family, including his paternal grandmother, Emma, Lady Monson, were travelling to Diani for a memorial service today at his mother's property, which looks out on to the Indian Ocean. During the service, some of his closest friends are expected to kitesurf in formation close to the coral reef off the beach, as others follow in traditional dugout canoes. Alexander was funny, witty, brilliantly clever, good looking and charming, his mother said. He was our golden boy. Lord Monson and the family have hired lawyers to conduct an independent investigation into the circumstances of Mr Monson's death. Kenyan police insist that he fell ill from the effects of smoking a strong local variant of cannabis, called bhang, and that the blood clot on his brain was caused by his drug use. A police spokesman refused to comment apart from to deny allegations that Mr Monson died after being beaten by a policeman early on Saturday morning. "That is not true, but we have to wait for the results of the full investigation to be able to prove that it is not true," the spokesman said. However, Richard Muguai, the chief of Kwale district police, which covers Diani, said yesterday that he would prosecute any officer found to have assaulted Mr Monson. "I continue to deny that my officers were in anyway involved in that man's death," he told The Daily Telegraph. But if any future investigations find they were involved I will personally charge them with murder. Mr Monson is expected to be cremated next week, on a funeral pyre of local timber and covered with palm-fronds and bougainvillea flowers, the same way in which his maternal grandparents, who lived in Kenya all their lives, were cremated.