Deaths in custody [CARF article]
01 January 1991
Deaths in custody [CARF article]
artdoc August=1992
Two coroner's inquests in the first week of March showed up yet
again the disregard for black life in the custodial system.
At Westminster Coroner's Court on 7 March, the jury decided that
Delroy McKnight, 29, killed himself in Wandsworth prison on 19
January while the balance of his mind was disturbed and that the
cause of his death was contributed to by lack of care. Debbie
Coles of Inquest told CARF that this 'was one of the most damning
inquest verdicts'.
Delroy bled to death, in the presence of a cell-mate, after he
had cut his throat on a piece of glass he had obtained by
smashing the cell window. According to his cell-mate, it took
prison officers 15 minutes to reach the cell after he had raised
the alarm. Delroy had been diagnosed as an acute paranoid
schizophrenic, considered to be a suicide risk and in need of
psychiatric assessment, according to Dr Bakshi from High Point
prison. That was the reason he had wanted him moved to
Wandsworth in December 1990, he said. But that information was
never conveyed to Wandsworth. Delroy was not treated as a
suicide risk, he was not on a special watch and no one appeared
to notice when he stopped eating, washing and taking his
medication. The young man ended his days reading and re-reading
the Old and New Testaments without moving from his bunk.
A moment of farce entered the court room as the coroner, looking
at Delroy's medical records, asked in bewilderment if the
admissions doctor at Wandsworth could spell out for him this
disease, abbreviated to acute psy, which Delroy had been
suffering from.
Delroy's death might have been prevented had the prison windows
been of perspex and not glass and had he received the proper care
and attention due to a sick man. Kimpua Nsimba, a Zairean, might
also be alive today had he been given an interpreter and basic
human attention when he arrived last June at Heathrow airport
claiming political asylum. His ID looked as if it had been
tampered with. No one found him a Lingala-speaking interpreter.
He was taken to Harmondsworth Detention Centre where no one
appears to have conversed with him for four days. Group 4, the
private security firm which runs the centre, began to look for
him when he did not have supper on 15 June. He could not be
found. A cleaner found him hanging from a pipe in a locked
toilet at 4.50pm the following day.
We will never know what was going through his mind in those last
days and hours; we'll never know exactly what he was fleeing
from. For the immigration service, for the Refugee Arrivals
Project, and for the police who had to investigate the death, he
was just another of those immigrants who did not deserve to be
here. This was the first recorded suicide in Harmondsworth. One
death is a death too many.
CARF, no 2, April/May 1991
Black people