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Ryan St George and his aunt Margaret |
Judge’s ruling will bring payout in millions,
but for Ryan it’s too late
RYAN St George rocks his head to one side, looks up and smiles, and for a moment it is almost as if he can understand what’s going on.
But his family know the painful truth. It’s doubtful whether he can recognise any of them, let alone hold a conversation.
The last time he could communicate with them properly, he was heading to Brixton Prison to serve a short term for shoplifting. In the eyes of his relatives, it turned out to be a life sentence for the minor crime of stealing a few household batteries.
Ten years on, Mr St George is severely brain-damaged, unable to do anything for himself and confined to a wheelchair. He is unaware that a High Court judge ruled on Friday that staff at the jail were responsible for his devastating injuries, a verdict paving the way for the Home Office to pay compensation possibly running to millions of pounds. The size of the settlement will be decided at a future stage.
“It has been 10 years of hell,” said his father David, yesterday (Wednesday). “We had to go to court to show what happened should never have happened and should not happen again. It is a win for Ryan but it is also a win for the people who will come after him.”
Ryan, 39, a former William Ellis School pupil who was living in Gresse Street, off Tottenham Court Road, at the time, fell from a top-bunk bed at the prison in November 1997 during an epileptic seizure. Unable to break his fall, he cracked open his head and sustained a gaping wound.
Medical help was repeatedly delayed, according to Mr Justice Mackay’s verdict, leaving the injured prisoner critically starved of oxygen.
By the time he reached hospital, the damage to his brain was irreversible and a chaplain was preparing to give him the last rites. Fellow inmates had assumed he had died after witnessing his shocking fight for life on the floor of their cell.
His family’s lawyers argued at the Royal Courts of Justice over three days last week that Mr St George should never have been put in a top bunk, given his history of seizures, recorded when he first arrived at the prison, and the probability that his withdrawal from street drugs could trigger them.
They pointed to the lack of urgency among prison staff and the delays faced by paramedics who had to abandon their ambulance because of a broken-down van blocking its path at the prison entrance.
His aunt, Margaret St George, now cares for her nephew around the clock.
When the New Journal visited them at her home in Castlehaven Road, Camden Town, yesterday (Wednesday), she said: “If they reacted even just a little bit quicker then maybe he would have been able to say a few words but Ryan is very, very disabled. He can’t do anything at all for himself but I said I would never leave him and I won’t. It is so sad.”
To her, he is the football-loving nephew who had misguidedly begun stealing from shops to raise money to buy heroin. “It has been 10 years but I still remember Ryan as he was before,” said his aunt, who is retired and never leaves his side.
“He was such a nice boy, popular. Drugs are a problem in Kentish Town and he was unlucky to get involved in it. His punishment was to be in prison and he wouldn’t have caused any trouble. His punishment wasn’t this.”
Kissing his forehead, she added: “I love him.”
Mr St George’s eyes dart around the room, one minute he is smiling, the next he looks angry. There is a gasp and a giggle but it is impossible to know what, if anything, he is thinking.
If you shake his hand he grips like a vice, his brain unable to tell his arm to let it go. Many experts who have met him are amazed that he did not die on that fate-ful night 10 years ago.
“When I take him out, people see him and try to speak to him because physically he looks OK,” said his aunt. “But he can’t talk back. It is so sad.”
Mr Justice Mackay said there had been a “culpable delay” as Mr St George lay “fitting” on the cell floor for more than 30 minutes, struggling to breathe.
He said: “Mr St George was an accident waiting to happen. I’m satisfied that no attention was paid by any person to his airway, prior to the arrival of the ambulance crew. The ambulance was kept waiting at a time when speed was of the essence by what the prison governor called the arrogant and unacceptable attitude of a particular prison officer.”
The compensation case was brought by his parents, who live in Kentish Town. While it took two years for the south London prison’s governor to send a letter of apology to them, it took a further eight before the case reached the High Court.
Mr Justice Mackay added: “I regard the failure to maintain his airway as a fundamental breach of reasonable practice by the prison nursing team. If oxygen was administered earlier I don’t think he would have suffered this damage.”
David St George is used to courtrooms, he is the longest-serving journalist with an office at the Old Bailey.
He thanked legal firm Hodge, Jones and Allen for taking on the case and the team who fought the case in court, David Pittaway QC and Jane Tracey-Forster.
“They did a great job,” he said. “It is a Life of Ryan but without the comedy. His [Ryan’s] life has been taken from him. I think they [the prison service] thought he had died – and if he had then maybe all of this would not have come out and nobody would have known what had gone on.
“We need the money to pay for care for the rest of his life but it won’t bring Ryan back. Nothing can do that now.”
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