Delay failed bereaved family, says FACK
The disillusioned mother of a young worker, who died after being crushed in a lift while transporting furniture at a pub in Swansea, has criticised the inquest system after the jury finally delivered a finding of accidental death.
Elizabeth Galbraith’s son Cyran Stewart was killed in February 2014, but it was four years before an inquest into his death took place.
According to the campaign group Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK), the inquest heard evidence that other members of staff had previously been trapped in the lift in similar ways when transporting furniture, but not injured.
In addition, the safety gate mechanism had been overridden. However, these incidents were not reported to the company’s head office or to health and safety consultants.
“It took four years to get this far,” said Galbraith, “and I had to sit in that inquest and hear witness after witness have the statements they made four years ago discredited because they could not now remember facts without referring to their statements.”
FACK spokesperson Hilda Palmer said: “Cyran was not killed in a freak, unforeseeable and unpreventable accident. According to evidence at the inquest he died after several other ‘near miss’ incidents where workers and supervisors were also trapped in the lift and had to be rescued.”
She called for a “swift decision on a prosecution of those responsible for protecting Cyran’s safety at work”.