Episode six: Matters of the heart

Sheku Bayoh: The Inquiry

"The heart can carry on beating almost to the bitter end." Professor Sebastian Lucas, expert witness

Physiologically speaking, the human heart is the body’s engine room, pumping blood and oxygen around the body.

It contracts with a regular rhythm and a steady beat from the second we are born to the moment we die.

That mechanism runs on repeat, contracting, pumping, carrying, returning. Until – sometimes suddenly – it stops.

Sheku Bayoh slipped out of consciousness on the morning of Sunday, the 3rd May 2015 after he had been restrained by police for about eight minutes.

He went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. In Kirkcaldy’s Victoria Hospital, the medical team spent more than an hour attempting to resuscitate him and restart his heart. But ultimately he was pronounced dead at 9:04 in the morning.

And so it is that, at 2pm on Monday, 4th May 2015, forensic pathologists Dr Kerryanne Shearer and Dr Ralph Bouhaidar found themselves standing in front of Sheku Bayoh’s body at Edinburgh’s city mortuary.

This episode is a pivotal one. It summarises what the experts have told the inquiry about the cause of Sheku Bayoh’s death.

His family and friends believe that he was killed as a result of the police restraint. Police, meanwhile, have always denied wrongdoing.

But what does the postmortem evidence show? We look at what expert witnesses told the inquiry.

Read the script in full" [documentcloud url="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23928021-six_-sheku-bayoh-the-heart-of-the-matter?responsive=1&title=1"]

Credits:

Written and produced by Karin Goodwin

Research by Tomiwa Folorunso

Recording, editing and sound design by Halina Rifai

Original music by Alan Bryden