At 1.50 in the morning on January 8, 2020, police officers in Reading found William Cameron walking his dog in the town centre and arrested him on suspicion of assault. He was 38 years old. Before he even reached the van, he had become unresponsive and limp. Officers carried him into a cell at Loddon Valley police station. He would never walk out of it.
The trial of Sean Cregg, a 36-year-old custody nurse employed through the Mountain Healthcare agency, opened this week at the Old Bailey. Cregg faces a charge of gross negligence manslaughter. The prosecution’s account, delivered by Zoe Johnson KC, is methodical and damning: a man in a life-threatening medical emergency was examined for less than three minutes, dismissed as a drunk pretending to be unconscious, and left to die on the floor of his cell.
Johnson told jurors that the duty custody sergeant had asked Cregg to assess Cameron. What followed, she said, was “the most cursory and negligent examination.” Cregg shone a torch into Cameron’s eyes. He placed a pulse oximeter on one of the man’s fingers and, when it produced no reading, made no further attempt to obtain one. He took Cameron’s pulse. He squeezed the trapezius muscles at Cameron’s shoulder — a standard pain-response test — and Cameron groaned. Cregg was in the cell for under three minutes. He concluded nothing required urgent action. Cameron remained on the cell floor, lying on his front.
The remark Cregg allegedly made while in the cell has become a focal point for the prosecution. “He has had something nice,” he is said to have commented. Johnson described it as “flippant” — a word that understates its significance. The remark, if accurate, suggests not confusion or misjudgement but a kind of casual contempt, the attitude of someone who has already categorised the man before him and sees no reason to look further. Johnson told jurors it spoke “volumes” about Cregg’s disposition toward a man for whom he held a direct duty of care.
Cameron had consumed a mixture of alcohol and drugs earlier that night. His partner, Theresa Yearwood, had called police to complain about him, though neither party had been injured and she later insisted there had been no assault — only a “figure of speech.” Body-worn camera footage shown to jurors captured Cameron begging not to be arrested, asking repeatedly, “What am I supposed to have done?” As he collapsed and began to groan, an officer asked how he had gone from walking his dog to this state. Cameron continued to groan. He was carried into the van.
The prosecution’s account of the hours that followed is stark. No one attempted to rouse Cameron during the night. At 6am, Cregg looked through the cell spyhole and saw that Cameron had not moved. He took no action. Johnson told the court that the defendant had accepted at face value the opinion of police officers that Cameron was faking unconsciousness — a clinical judgement outsourced to people with no clinical training, made about a man who was, in fact, dying.
At 7.04am, a police officer looked through the spyhole and could not see Cameron breathing. Emergency services were called. It was, the court heard, too late. Cameron had almost certainly gone into cardiac arrest one to two hours earlier. He was pronounced dead at 8.16am. The cause of death was a heart attack brought on by the ingestion of alcohol and drugs — a condition that, Johnson told jurors, was survivable had Cameron been taken to hospital when Cregg first examined him.
The prosecution was unequivocal on this point. “This was not an unfortunate bad day at the office,” Johnson said. “This was a grossly negligent failure by Sean Cregg which led to the death of William Cameron. If William Cameron had been taken to hospital when Sean Cregg examined him, he would have survived.” That conditional — survivable, had one nurse done his job — carries the weight of the entire case.
Cregg, who lives in Newbury, Berkshire, denies both the gross negligence manslaughter charge and an alternative offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act. His defence is that he genuinely believed Cameron was drunk and did not require hospital transfer. That belief, if sincerely held, does not in itself constitute a defence against gross negligence; the legal question is whether a competent medical professional in his position could reasonably have reached that conclusion, and whether the departure from proper standards of care was so serious as to be criminal.
What the case also surfaces, without the prosecution needing to dwell on it, is the structural context in which Cameron died. He was a man described in court as leading a “somewhat chaotic” life, one shaped by alcohol and substance dependency. He was arrested on the basis of a domestic complaint that his partner later disavowed. He was carried unconscious into a cell and placed on his front. The officers around him assumed he was performing. The nurse assumed the same. The systems designed to protect a person in custody — medical oversight, welfare checks, clinical assessment — all, allegedly, failed him in sequence. Cameron groaned when pressure was applied to his shoulder. He was alive. He was left there anyway.
The trial before Mrs Justice Thornton is expected to last seven weeks. What it must ultimately determine is not only whether Cregg’s conduct crossed the threshold into criminal liability, but how a man could lie dying on a cell floor for hours while those responsible for his welfare persuaded themselves he was merely inconvenient.