“It is unknown where exactly the defendant was during the critical 71 seconds of the epileptic seizure.” For the judges of the Vaud Cantonal Court, gray areas remain around the death of Lamine Fatty. This 23-year-old Gambian asylum seeker died of an epileptic seizure in October 2017 while spending the night in a cell at the Blécherette cantonal police center in Lausanne.
The security guard in charge of the surveillance cameras that night was prosecuted for negligent homicide, before the Public Prosecutor’s Office ruled that he had played no “direct and faulty role in the outcome tragic”. But the prosecution, which had closed the case without further action, is forced to reopen the investigation, reports RTS.
“We still have the hope that we can arrive, in the short term, at a referral to court and a public trial,” confided Me Christophe Tafelmacher, lawyer for the family of the deceased. The latter considers that the agent “did not complete his job” and that the death of Lamine Fatty could have been avoided in the event of an immediate reaction, adds the RTS. The young man had convulsed several times for more than an hour, without anyone noticing. His death was noted more than two hours after the first symptoms appeared, when the police entered his cell to transfer him to another canton.
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