Death of Marc Cole, Falmouth

Thursday would have been my youngest brother's 33^rd birthday. A Pisces born in March under the sign of water. He would have, I should imagine, thrown some type of family dinner celebration with all his children, friends and family present. Marc loved nothing more than being surrounded by all the people who loved him. He would be stood in the kitchen with a huge grin on his face, laughing with his friends and asking for a second helping of whatever it was cooking on the stove. The kids would be running up and down the hallways high on birthday cake and Marc would be telling them to slow down and be careful, ‘my angels’.

Instead, it’s raining, the wind-driven type of rain that whips around your face like ice and makes your ears ache. My mum is standing at the head of her son's 8-foot grave, laying bright orange and yellow tulips. She doesn’t like to go. None of us do, but she can’t leave the grave untidy so she goes religiously and talks to her son. Her child who was killed three years ago during a mental health crisis by police officers.

It is not real. Not to any of us and that may sound odd after three years but only a family who had been through the hell of having a child and brother killed by an agent of the state and subsequently dragged through one of the most traumatic ‘systems’ on earth would ever be able to relate. It took 7 months for Marc’s badly decomposed body to be returned to our family in such an appalling state that the funeral director advised us that Marc would be best left in a sealed coffin. That furthermore, we wouldn’t be able to dress him for burial or view him. At all.

You need a funeral to make the death of your child real don’t you? But how can you accept that it is real when you have no body to bury? How can you function every day knowing your brother is lying in a morgue with his organs missing for nearly a year? How can you ever begin to comprehend a country in which it is ok for an officer of the law to take the life of your child, then take the body of your child, then take the organs of your child and to then take the burial of your child?

Three years later we attended an Inquest, just recently in January. These last three years have been agonizing and nearly driven us to lose our minds on several occasions. You cannot grieve with proceedings like these hanging over you. You cannot engage in any trauma-therapy at the same time as constantly and continuously having to read graphic evidence about your brother's last moments that is being slowly drip fed to you as the case progresses. You cannot heal whilst at the same time fighting a protracted legal case and justice campaign. Make no mistake, the system following a death after police restraint is deliberately designed to grind you down. It wants you to get sick and to suffer. It hopes that you will shrivel and retract and go away. It hopes that it can blame the victim for his or her own death.

Marc had been at his friends’ house when he suffered an episode of psychosis. Marc had mental health issues and was struggling and fighting against himself, knowing he needed medical help but at the same time feeling terrified of doing so. Instead Marc had used drugs to self-medicate on the night he died which had exacerbated his pre-existing mental health condition. It is hard for most people to understand what psychosis must feel like, but on a basic level it is a disorder of perception. The way you perceive the world becomes distorted. You may see or hear things that appear absolutely real to you but are not really there. You may hold beliefs about things happening that appear absolutely real to you but are not really happening. Most people who experience acute psychosis experience extreme terror and fear.

My brother died absolutely petrified. He was running away from people he believed were trying to kill him. His thoughts were racing and disordered and his palpable terror was clearly demonstrated to anyone who saw him that night. He wasn’t violent. He wasn’t aggressive. He wasn’t antagonistic. He wasn’t deranged. He was very urgently unwell and he was terrified. That part of the run-up to Marc’s last moments on earth culminated in him self-harming with a knife.

Four police officers who attended that night said that Marc needed to be stopped from self-harming and fired a Taser at him. Then they reactivated it and held the trigger down and kept electrocuting Marc for 42 seconds. A total of three times. While Marc was lying on his back, in the prone position, not resisting, not moving, just lying helpless on the floor. Then they used a metal baton to strike Marc’s wrist twice before applying double cuffs to his wrists.

Less than four minutes later Marc was still cuffed when he went into catastrophic cardiac arrest. 20 minutes later he was dead at the scene.

Before the Inquest started, Devon and Cornwall Police asserted that the Taser download log, which automatically records the times and durations of all Taser firings, was faulty. They also submitted an application to give evidence anonymously, which they later withdrew. During the Inquest it transpired in evidence, that the officer PC WILSON gave three different statements at three different times. He only admitted to tasering Marc twice. It soon became clear that he had actually tasered Marc three times, actively lied and then admitted under cross-examination that he had been given advice about what to say about his use of force against my brother by the Federation of Police.

PC Kevern embellished an account of Marc’s demeanour stating that he was walking around with his top off and that he was ‘growling’ and aggressive. Growling is a word officers like to use in an attempt to dehumanise the person they have killed. It is often used by officers to dehumanise victims who had been suffering mental health issues, which should go some way to explain the regard with which officers attend mental health patients who need urgent medical attention. When pressed under cross examination she still maintained that Marc was aggressive and resisting and had his top off.

All of this was directly and very quickly shown to be untrue and deliberately falsified when the attending Paramedic told the court that after Marc had been tasered he had to actually cut Marc’s top off to give him emergency CPR. Multiple eye witnesses who witnessed the entire scene said that Marc was only gesticulating as if to harm himself. He hadn’t actually harmed himself but that they were all concerned for his welfare. They all said that they did not feel threatened by Marc in any way because he was not violent or aggressive. He just seemed unwell.

A critical eye witness then said she saw police officers charging at Marc and screaming at him to put down the knife. She says she clearly heard and saw Marc say ‘why what have I done?’ A second eye witness saw and heard Marc say this. They both said he sounded scared and confused. Both eye witnesses said that the police did not give Marc a chance to reply or even respond. They just kept charging at him and it is my understanding that this mishandling of the situation and failure to deescalate an urgent medical emergency situation using their training is what then forced Marc in his terror and confusion to self- harm.

This was then they fired the Taser at him. The eye witness said Marc went down like a sack of spuds and didn’t ever get back up again. The Taser discharges for a period of 5 seconds on the X-26 model before having to be actively retriggered again. PC Wilson retriggered the Taser twice more with only one second between each firing. So Marc endured a near continuous 42 seconds of electrocution which is nearly ten times the length of what he actually should have been tasered for, as each cycle is only five seconds long.

That is the longest recorded case of Taser torture, actively and significantly being a causative factor in the death of a young UK citizen with mental health issues in the history of this country. Medical experts who specialise in Cardiology said that the timeline of events was particularly significant in Marc’s case. They agreed that yes, Marc had cocaine in his system, but that he was ok until he was tasered, after which he dropped immediately to the floor and went into cardiac arrest within 4 minutes. Put simply, he didn’t suffer a cardiac arrest after using cocaine over 30 minutes earlier. He suffered cardiac arrest after being tortured with a Taser for ten times longer than he should have been.

Marc’s self-harm wounds were proven in pathology to not have contributed to his death in any way. No traces of cocaine were found in Marc’s brain or heart chambers, suggesting that the drug metabolised very quickly and that there was no history of chronic or sustained drug abuse in his organs, so while the cocaine certainly pre-disposed Marc to the enhanced risk factors of Taser-torture, it wasn’t a case of drugs being the precipitating causal factor.

 After hearing all the expert evidence, the jury made the correct decision and found that the Taser actively made a significant contribution to the causative factors in my brother’s death. They directly linked the Taser to the death of Marc Cole and actively rejected the embellished version of events given by Devon and Cornwall Police. They found no evidence of violence or aggression on Marc’s part but instead concluded that Marc had been behaving erratically and self-harming due to mental illness and the use of cocaine.

Despite this conclusion being made on the grounds of expert medical evidence, no officers were charged with manslaughter or even misconduct. There has been no recourse to date for any of the officers who deliberately lied in statements, or under oath and sat laughing and joking throughout the whole traumatic proceeding as if it was a bunch of pals out on their jollies. PC Wilson and his barrister tried to submit that he had been suffering with PTSD. No clinical evidence was submitted to the court to support this claim. However, one has to ask, if an officer genuinely is suffering with PTSD as all members of my family are, it should follow that the officer should have a restriction placed on all his operational duties. Returning to work after 3 weeks and carrying a Taser again is not usually the course of action a traumatised individual would take. PTSD takes a lot longer than 3 weeks to be clinically diagnosed and in any case an individual suffering any type of flashback-related symptoms should not be left in charge of a Taser on the grounds of profound unsafety.

The attending paramedics offered sincere condolences to us at the Inquest. In contrast the police did not. I didn’t see one ounce of remorse on their faces as I watched them exposed in lie after lie. But that’s okay, because the truth keeps talking long after the conversation has finished. There may not be any man-made justice for my poor brother, but to be honest I don’t think it’s mans’ to give. When you are involved in the loss of a human life, when your actions take a father from his children, when you destroy multiple families, when you choose to make a deliberate decision to self-preserve instead of tell the truth, then that is no longer between you and a judge. That is between you and God. You cannot wash the blood of a man from your hands quite as easily as you can laugh in the face of a grieving family in a court-room.

If a different emergency-responder had attended first I believe sincerely that Marc would still be alive today. I truly feel that going forwards we need to urgently implement a new system in dealing with mental health in the community. The police should not be anywhere near a person who is experiencing a mental health crisis. Too many people die in the hands of the police, despite ‘mental health training’ they do not appear to use it and routinely dehumanise people who just need a bit of empathy and a calm person to make them feel safe. The best scenario would be for the government to invest in mental health first-response cars consisting of paramedics and mental health nurses.

This scheme was piloted in London but I definitely feel that Cornwall urgently needs a similar mental health emergency response given the prolific numbers of young people in crisis, particularly young men in the area. Specialist ambulance crews are what is needed and a suitable place of safety for patients to be taken to. Police cars and A & E departments are not desirable places for people in acute distress. Sending a group of police with an increasing militarised response to aggressively restrain a terrified person is barbaric and never ends well.

The government needs to put less police onto the streets and more funding into mental health and community-led services. If you address the issues in society that lead to mental ill-health in the first place, then the police wouldn’t need to be called and people would not end up dead in their incompetent hands.

There have been 1,732 deaths after police contact in this country since 1990. Zero prosecutions of police. The IOPC reported in their annual review of 2018-19 that a total of 10 people with mental health issues were found dead after police restraint and a further 13 people with co-morbid drug or alcohol issues were also found dead in police custody. You only have to look at the well-publicised cases of all the young men and women aggressively restrained or neglected in police custody who end up dead to see that police forces all over the country continue to dehumanise, deliberately misunderstand and fail to learn from people presenting with mental health difficulties.

Marc Cole, Adrian McDonald, Darren Cumberbatch, Andrew Pimlott - all tasered to death during a mental health crisis. Sean Rigg, Seni Lewis, James Herbert, Thomas Orchard, Kingsley Burrell, Mzee Mohammed (18) - all restrained to death during a mental health crisis. Devon and Cornwall Police alone have been involved in the deaths of Marc Cole, Thomas Orchard, Antony Kitts, Leslie Douthwaite, Andrew Pimlott and Logan Peters.

Theresa May actually called for a review into the use of force by police citing that physical restraint and Tasers were more often used against victims who had mental health issues. She found that 30% of people tasered by the Metropolitan Police had mental health difficulties and a staggering 50% of people tasered by police were from black or other BME backgrounds. In the year 2017, the year that Marc’s life was taken, 25 victims died following contact with the UK police. That was the highest and sharpest rise in deaths after police restraint since 2008.

Increasingly children up and down the country are being routinely tasered in playgrounds and pupil referral units. These children often have SEN Needs and mental illness. In 2018-19 for example in figures obtained from a freedom of information request, Cheshire Police had tasered children a whopping 25 times.  We need to urgently push back against this militarisation of the police. Police have absolutely no place in schools and especially not with Tasers. Of particular concern is the uncertainty and confusion that officers appear to present with when questioned on the safety of Tasers in relation to their use on vulnerable people.

In the Taser training manual that had been used to train Devon and Cornwall Police, only ONE power-point slide was included in the effects of tasering vulnerable people. People vulnerable to tasering are specifically referred to as having enhanced risk factors. They can be read about in other research and reports, however the training provided to rank and file police officers in this one power point slide was incredibly sparse. It seems that officers do not know much about the risk of death and serious injury when using Tasers against people with enhanced risk factors. Enhanced risk factors that make people vulnerable to death and serious injury following tasering are any person presenting with mental ill health, intoxication, pregnancy, epilepsy, the elderly or children. The Taser trainer stated that there was an incremental increase in risk the more times a Taser firing was repeated.

However, despite there being very clear and serious evidence regarding the very real risk of death when tasering vulnerable people, there does not appear to be ANY guidelines whatsoever on the safe upper limit of time that you can Taser a person for without causing cardiac arrest. The advice given to officers is to just keep on tasering at your own discretion.

This is highly disturbing given the scientific evidence presented by DOMILL in relation to enhanced risk factors, the increasing number of deaths in the UK following Taser restraint (see Cole, McDonald, Begley, Cumberbatch, Pimlott, Atkinson) and the very fact that a UN committee of ten experts declared that Tasers are a form of torture that CAN kill. Given that Marc’s Inquest found that the Taser played a pivotal role in his death due to electrocution, it follows that his death directly violates the UN’s Convention Against Torture.

As a result of Marc’s Inquest conclusion the Coroner has written a Prevention of Future Deaths Report to the Home Office and they have 56 days to respond. Our family are also waiting from a response from the Secretary of State with regards to a meeting and Louise Haigh MP has also raised the issues arising from Marc’s death in Parliament.

We sincerely hope that Marc’s death has not been in vain and that an urgent review of the safety of Tasers, particularly when used to restrain vulnerable people, will be conducted. We do not want any more people in mental health crisis to die in the hands of the very people who should be taking them to safety for medical treatment.

*

The preceding statement, written by the sister of the deceased man, is a harrowing testament to the reality of our nation’s way of dealing with a mental-health crisis. I am convinced that Marc Cole’s death was totally unnecessary. The facts, as detailed above, speak for themselves. Marc was in need of skilled intervention, of help that would not be perceived as threatening. Far too often, in situations like this, force is used by police to try to subjugate the person in crisis and typically, the suffering individual is terrified and further traumatized by the forceful approach of police and these already highly stressed situations are escalated when just the opposite approach is what is needed.  Such escalation frequently results in tragedy.

My own particular angle on all this is that I have been campaigning against police use of Taser stun-guns for ten years now and have seen the death-toll in Britain grow from just one in 2010 to over a dozen and, as I fearfully predicted back then, I have lived to see this dubious weapon of torture bring death into my local area.

My attempts to discuss the legality of Taser, particularly in view of the UN’s position on stun guns and Britain’s non-ratification of the UNCAT, have met with such a solid and unyielding brick-wall that I have become convinced that true democracy and the rule of law are flouted at will by those paid and entrusted with upholding them. Approaches to former MP Andrew George (Lib Dem) bore no fruit. Promises from current MP Derek Thomas (Tory) to raise the above matter in Parliament have proved false. Similarly, the promise of dialogue from Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall Police, Sean Sawyer has proven empty. All this correspondence has been documented exhaustively on this website over the last ten years, mainly categorized under the RESIST CARDIAC ARREST Campaign. In conclusion, having exhausted all the official channels of redress and debate and found the ‘authorities’ lacking any desire to live up to the transparency and accountability they like to boast of, I feel that we, the ordinary people, have to try to put forward our own positive solutions to these problems.

Police are fighters. As part of their job they have to tackle violence in public life so they naturally have a strategic mentality. Whilst this may be necessary in some areas of life, it renders them particularly inappropriate responders to mental-health crises. By studying many cases of fatality-by-police, certain patterns emerge and similarities crop up again and again. But lessons that could easily be learned are not being successfully integrated into police-training.

I strongly support the idea of a new emergency-service, tasked with responding to mental-health emergencies and treating them primarily as a health issue, rather than a matter of subduing a person who is seen as acting disturbed in public.

There are serious problems over justice in the case of Marc Cole, as in so many cases. For example, can you imagine being caught lying in a Court of Justice and facing no disciplinary action if the case concerned the death of a police-constable? And yet two of the constables involved in the death of Marc Cole were found to have been lying but faced no perjury-charge or reprimand whatsoever. Would the ordinary public get away with such falsification if the case involved a police-constable? I don’t think so.

While police in fatality-cases are provided the finest QC’s to plead their cases – at tax-payer’s expense, ordinary folk who lose their loved ones have to go through the Legal Aid minefield or somehow stump up money for a lawyer themselves. There is currently a campaign to equalize this process and provide automatic free legal aid to those bereaved by State-violence.

The so-called ‘Taser’ evolved from a simple cattle-prod into a hybrid electric harpoon that delivers 50,000 – yes, fifty thousand, volts to its victim. It has been associated with hundreds of cardiac arrest deaths around the world and is known to stop the heart if the prongs hit the cardiac-area during a certain point in the rhythm of the heartbeat. Combined with excessive levels of adrenalin (from stress) and also intoxicants and restraint, the Taser is all too often a bringer of death. The police have every right to defend themselves – but not with a weapon that violates the UNCAT – even though Britain secretly never ratified the Convention we had helped to draft! The UN informed me of Britain’s failure to ratify UNCAT when I complained to them about a previous case of Taser-torture by Falmouth police. Ironically I only went to the UN because the local police would not take on the complaint.

With the continuing Wall of Silence from police and MPs over these issues it seems unlikely that stun-guns will undergo the immanent legal-challenge they so badly need. And with the policy of ‘Austerity’ that has so withered public services and undermined the healthy fabric of society, it seems that more vulnerable people will be harmed or slaughtered by this sinister new weapon that has been imposed upon us without debate or consensus.

Which raises the question of what can people do to try to foster and protect mental health in our communities and what steps can we take to try to save people from the tragic fate of 30 year-old Marc Cole from Falmouth?

Even when we are dissatisfied with our political representatives, I think it is still worth trying to talk to them and trying to get them to commit to making mental-health a top-priority when forming policy. Why is suicide the number one cause of death of young men between 25 – 35 in Britain? This is an epidemic and it needs to be treated as such, not responded to with military-style force in our streets.

My own view is that if the government fails us, then we have to look out for each other more – to come out of our personal bubbles more and reach out to others and say ‘are you alright?’ or ‘would you like a chat’ or whatever, to merely break down the isolation between people and look with a loving eye on our neighbours, friends and families. There are also various groups and societies, holding meetings where people can share their feelings and help each other through difficulties. There is a lot of good in the community and this can always be built on and increased. However, ultimately matters of policing, mental-health etc are largely the business of government and until officialdom can treat people decently and fairly and enter into dialogue on these issues, and until those in power are willing to uphold the rule of law and truly represent the populace, the deadly threat of Taser will remain with us.

This needs to change.