A chief superintendent shrugged his shoulders when confronted over whether Sheku Bayoh had been killed by police officers, the inquiry into his death in custody has been told.
Bayoh’s partner, Collette Bell, alleged that Ch Supt Garry McEwan, who has now retired, told her that the father of her baby had died during a “forceful arrest” using sprays and batons, and that she responded furiously: “So you battered him to death?”
She told the inquiry: “He raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders … that will never leave me.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Are you serious? Is it you don’t know, you don’t care?’ I was so angry … I remember shouting, ‘You’re not going to get away with this’.”
Bell gave her evidence at a closed hearing recorded earlier this week, which was played to the inquiry under Lord Bracadale, in Edinburgh, on Thursday.
Bayoh, 31, died in handcuffs and sustained multiple injuries after officers responded to calls from the public about a man brandishing a knife and behaving erratically early on a Sunday morning in Kirkcaldy, Fife, in May 2015.
Bayoh’s family believe his death was caused by positional asphyxia because of the tactics used by the police, whom they allege overreacted and were motivated by racial bias.
During three hours of testimony, Bell described feeling “panicked, worried and confused” when police officers came to her mother’s home, where she was staying with her baby, but she said they refused to give any information until she accompanied them to the police station.
When she was finally told “a body has been found that matches your partner’s description”, Bell said she immediately wanted to know what had happened: “Had he collapsed, did he have wounds, has he been stabbed?”
Bell said that she was told “a passerby had found him dead on the street”.
Asked how she now felt about this alleged withholding of information by Angela Grahame KC, senior counsel for the inquiry, Bell replied that she was disgusted.
“I don’t feel it’s withholding information, that is a straight up lie,” she said.
She said she was then pushed into making a statement, during which she said she was asked repeatedly about their relationship, and whether she and Bayoh had had an argument the previous day.
“I felt they were very misleading and they used me – they were trying to gather as much information on Shek as they could that would benefit them … they knew that I was a vulnerable person and that I thought I was helping them find out what had happened to him.”
Bell described trying to piece together what happened with Bayoh’s sister, Kadi Johnson, who gave her own evidence last week. Johnson told Bell she had been told that he had died in an ambulance on the way to hospital. Bell recalled responding: “What ambulance? I was told he was found dead on the street.”
Last week, Johnson set out a catalogue of alleged errors, miscommunications and conflicting information as she described her family’s treatment by the police and authorities from the moment they were informed her brother had died.
After Johnson’s evidence, a number of police witnesses denied telling the family that he had been “found dead”, but one said he was directed not to tell the family that Bayoh had come into contact with the police.
Bell also said that Kate Frame, then the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner for Scotland, was “quite snide and arrogant” during meetings with the family and admitted that Police Scotland had “inherited some bad apples” when it amalgamated regional forces.
Bell later alleged that the former lord advocate James Wolffe had suggested at one meeting with the family that “if [Bayoh] wasn’t flailing around then this wouldn’t have happened”.
She went on: “I remember thinking, ‘You’re not having any more of my time if that’s your opinion and I certainly don’t think that you’re going to be doing anything in our best interest’.”
