Ginario Da Costa, Edson's father, said: "Edir's passing has left a huge hole in our lives. Seeing him with his little boy made me so proud, but now his son will have to grow up without his father.
"Losing Edir has broken my heart. We will forever feel that if things had been done differently his life may have been saved."
He added that hearing details of the last moments of Edson's life had been extremely traumatic for the family and something they would never forget.
"We cannot help but wonder whether Edir would still be here had the police identified the risk of Edir choking earlier and taken steps to help him," Mr Da Costa said.Did the poor man have a medical condition? Was he brutally restrained in a dangerous and illegal fashion?
Well...no.
Cmdr Musker said: "The inquest heard evidence that Mr Da Costa had chosen to swallow 88 wraps of controlled drugs wrapped in a plastic bag in the course of being stopped to avoid detection by police.
"This was not immediately apparent to the officers involved. It is clear that swallowing drugs is a lethally dangerous thing to do."Well, it's apparent to everyone except the family of this waste of oxygen.
And to the usual suspects, who see yet another campaign slip through their fingers:
Edson is one of five young black men who died within a six-month period following police restraints, according to the charity Inquest. It slammed the tactics the officers and Met's legal teams employed during Edson's inquest.
Deborah Coles, Inquest's director, said she believed "a hostile environment was created through the defensive and combative tactics of police lawyers, who sought to narrow lines of inquiry and divert attention away from the circumstances that resulted in Edir's death.
"This adversarial approach must not be tolerated as it fundamentally undermines the ability of an inquest to seek the truth."Translation: "Waaah! S'not fair! How dare you not just roll over and let us excoriate you for doing your job (for once)!"
Susie Labinjoh, head of civil liberties at Hodge & Allen, representing the family, said the inquest highlighted concerns about how police respond to people suspected of placing drugs in their mouths.
"A great deal needs to be done, both with officers on the street and those in the control room, to ensure tragedies like this do not happen again," she added.What 'tragedy'..?
3 comments:
It seems to have been the plastic bag that killed him, not the drugs. This is a pity, because I firmly believe that people carrying large quantities of drugs should be forced to swallow them and deal with the consequences.
Of course, if he'd been made to pay 5p for each plastic bag, which we all know are demonic items intended to destroy the world, then perhaps he would have used something more benign, like paper wraps.Then I'd have had my way.
On the other hand, if the police had been carrying sharp-pointed kitchen knives (collected during stop-and-search in that neighbourhood), they could have stabbed him in the throat and allowed him to breathe.
Can you actually be a good father when you are a useless waste of air drug dealer?
It's always somebody else's fault isn't it?
Seems like Justice was actually served in this case.
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