Family's sorrow at Wolverhampton bus death failings
The family of a man who died on a bus outside a police station, with officers failing to come to his aid, today said 'more could have been done'.
Police and station staff in Wolverhampton did not come to help Tony Jones, 28, who was unconscious on the Dudley-to-Tettenhall bus parked outside the main city centre base in Bilston Street.
His family today said 'all we are left with is ifs and buts'.
His sister Stacey Law, a 37-year-old mother of one, said: "More could have been done. The police were all first-aid trained – if just one of them had gone out they might have kept him breathing a little bit longer and given the paramedics more of a chance of saving him.
"I am not saying that this would have made a difference to the final outcome but at least we would have known that everything possible had been done to save him.
"All we have is ifs and buts. The incident was not even properly logged by the police."
Mr Jones, who died on October 17, was from Gill Street, Netherton.
His other sister, 27-year-old Sara Hart, from Upper Gornal, said he was 'one of a kind'.
"He loved his family," she said. "But he had a troubled life and did not seem able to cope with the outside world like the rest of us. We were all quite close to Tony and helped him where we could but he would just go off and do his own thing."
Mr Jones could not be saved by paramedics and was certified dead at the scene less than an hour after the bus was estimated to have arrived at the police station and officers were alerted. He had a cocktail of alcohol, heroin and sleeping pills in his blood that could have caused death within half an hour, said pathologist Dr Manel Mangalika at the inquest this week.
It was assumed Mr Jones had fallen asleep drunk when he slumped forward after drinking beer on the bus, the hearing was told.
Driver Ravinder Kumar stopped at Fighting Cocks to check on him but got no response.
He explained: "I was told he was drunk, thought he might be violent and decided to go straight to the police station."
He took the bus to the station where he asked for help in getting a drunk off the bus without suggesting it was an emergency.
No officer came out and when Mr Kumar returned a second time to warn that it appeared the man had stopped breathing he was told to make a 999 call on his own phone because he had the details of the incident, the inquest was told.
Black Country Coroner Zafar Siddique concluded it was a drugs and alcohol-related death and the outcome was unlikely to have been different if police had intervened sooner.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating.
