Police told dad ‘Get on with it’ after daughter died in jail

A GRIEVING father was told by police he would ‘just have to get on with it’ when they broke the news his daughter had died in prison, an inquiry has heard.

William Bruce was ‘unhappy’ with the way he had been informed and had ‘a number of concerns in relation to the circumstances’ of the death of Tammi, 38.

Miss Bruce, a mother of two, was found dead in her cell at Polmont Prison, near Falkirk, in November 2017. She was being held on remand on charges of assault.

Her father, of Auchterarder, Perthshire, told the fatal accident inquiry into her death that an officer had said: ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this, Tammi’s dead... you’ll just have to get on with it. When my father died I had to.’

Falkirk Sheriff Court also heard that a post-mortem examination and toxicology tests had proved inconclusive. A jail doctor said he had stopped her taking medication including opiates, tranquillisers, and powerful painkillers she had been prescribed in the community for ‘historic’ slipped discs and fractured ribs.

Dr Jahangir Khan withdrew the ‘very potent’ drugs after talking to Miss Bruce’s GP, adding: ‘The pain she was describing didn’t tally with the medication.’

Following the inquiry, Sheriff Derek Livingston ruled the cause of Miss Bruce’s death was unknown. He found there were no reasonable precautions which could have been taken to prevent the death.

He added that there was no evidence to indicate that the withdrawal of the drugs caused Miss Bruce’s death.