A woman who, along with her partner, remained undiscovered in a crashed car for days would likely have survived if not for an “organizational failure” in police call handling procedures, an inquest has found.
Lamara Bell, 25, and John Yuill, 28, died after their car left the M9 near Stirling on July 5, 2015, as they returned from a camping trip.
They spent three days in their Renault Clio before being discovered on July 8, despite police being alerted to the incident.
Yuill, a father of five, was pronounced dead at the scene, while Mrs Bell, a mother of two, died four days later in hospital.
Sheriff James Williamson concluded in his determination, published following a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI), that there was no system for reconciling information recorded by officers in notebooks with the actions taken.
He said: “Police Scotland’s failure to adequately assess the risks of call handling procedures and to have a reconciliation system was an organizational failure.”
Police Scotland repeated its apology to the families of those who died, adding that “significant improvements” have been made to call handling systems since 2015, which are now “incomparable” to the systems in place at the time.
However, Yuill suffered unbearable injuries in the accident. Mrs. Bell would probably have survived if she had received medical attention on the day of the incident, despite having long-term neurological problems.
Sheriff Williamson noted that Bilston Glen Police’s call handling center was under pressure that summer due to staff shortages, and there was confusion among officers about the tripartite call handling system comprising the Aspire, Avaya and Storm systems. .
Police Sergeant Brian Henry, now retired, volunteered to work overtime at Bilston Glen, arriving in what the sheriff described as a “confusing and turbulent working environment”.
The inquest heard that on 5 July he received a call from a farmer called John Wilson reporting a car off the road and recorded it in his police notebook, but was unable to record it in the Storm case management system and no action was taken. outlet.
Sheriff Williamson found that police had not identified the risk of missed calls.
He said: “Brian Henry was inadequately trained and left unsupervised to operate a system that allowed human errors to go unnoticed.
“His undetected human error resulted in Lamara Bell being left in a vehicle on the side of a major highway in Scotland, suffering devastating injuries.
“These injuries, along with the delay in rescuing and treating her, led to her death.”
The car was discovered on July 8, 2015, after another member of the public called police.
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Sheriff Williamson found that the incident was not the result of an individual failure by Police Scotland, but “of more than one and these failures occurred over a long period of time during which the opportunity to resolve them was lost”.
The FAI emerged after Ms Bell’s family received more than £1 million in compensation from Police Scotland in a civil settlement in December 2021.
In September 2021, the force was fined £100,000 at the High Court in Edinburgh after pleading guilty to health and safety failures that “materially contributed” to Mrs.
Sheriff Williamson said Bell’s suffering over a three-day period when she was seriously injured but conscious was “almost incomprehensible.”
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