Dad Shouts ‘I Can’t Breathe’ As Security Guards Pin Him Down Before Unlawful Killing

A young father who repeatedly warned security guards he couldn’t breathe while they pinned him down was unlawfully killed, an inquest has ruled.

Jack Barnes was held down by four Metrolink Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) following an altercation at Manchester Victoria Station in October 2016 and suffered a fatal cardiac arrest.

The 29-year-old from Hull can be heard ‘I can’t breathe’ seven times while being pressed face-down into the pavement in footage from one of their bodycams. Coroner Nigel Meadows said the workers’ actions amounted to manslaughter.

Paul Fogarty, Brian Gartside, Matthews Sellers and Stephen Rowlands were ‘overstimulated and aroused’ and failed to phone police during the incident despite several opportunities to do so, he added. Jack ‘could have and should have been sat up’ after telling them he couldn’t breathe but was instead subjected to ‘grossly excessive’,

‘unreasonable’ and ‘deliberate’ force, the coroner ruled. The father-of-one had been out with friends when they were challenged by a CSR at St Peter’s Square around 8pm who suspected they were smoking illegal drugs, the court heard, and he is thought to have responded with abusive language. The court heard that at some point in the day he had taken Spice, a synthetic substance similar to cannabis which has been linked to more aggressive behaviour.

They were recognised by the same CSR at Manchester Victoria around 11.30pm, after which a group of colleagues confronted them about the earlier abuse. A row broke out during which Jack swung his drawstring backpack at the staff, hitting two of them. According to Metrolink’s policy the CSRs should have walked away and phoned police if necessary, and cannot ‘grab hold of a person’ or ‘pursue a passenger either off the platform or trackside’.

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The inquest was told all staff had been reminded of this at the start of their shift. Instead they chased him for more than half a mile out of the station – two on foot, two in a taxi – before catching him outside a restaurant in central Manchester.

At one point, Rowlands, who had served as a police officer for 13 years until leaving the force due to an injury in 1989, took charge of the restraint position, gripping Jack’s neck and holding his left arm behind him while putting pressure on his back. He could be heard telling Jack: ‘We’re gonna put you out pal. You’re all right. ‘If you struggle, I will put you to sleep. It won’t kill you but you will go to sleep for a while.’

He told the coroner he had ‘restrained well over 1,000 people’ in the role and that ‘it didn’t enter my head’ to follow Metrolink’s ‘walk away’ policy. All four CSRs refused to answer many questions about the incident, having been advised that doing so could incriminate them.

1,000 metres as well as an element of resistance to restraint in the initial stages but also the prolonged restraint itself and the unreasonable and excessive force used to do so. The restraint ‘more than minimally, trivially or negligibly contributed’ to the cardiac arrest, he found.

After the inquest, Jack’s mother Patricia Gerrard said: ‘From day one I have said that the people involved have needed to be prosecuted for what they did to Jack. ‘If this had been the other way around, my Jack would have been sent to prison. I am certain of that. ‘He should still be here with us and to see his beautiful daughter grow up.’

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