Man acquitted of workplace death

A man has been acquitted of killing a teenage colleague by starting a machine while he was inside.

Michael Mclean, 17, died in hospital in August 2015 several days after an incident on the last day of his summer job at an Aberdeenshire industrial cleaning firm.

Dean Reynolds, 23, from Keith, denied culpable homicide. A jury at the High Court in Aberdeen took an hourand-a-half to find the charge not proven by a majority.

Mr Mclean was found at the premises of Denholm Macnamee, in Inverurie. The teenager’s father Mark Mclean who also worked at the firm battled to save his life by performing CPR after the alarm was raised about his son. The spooler machine in question is used to raise and lower subsea cables.

The trial heard the company was earlier fined £120,000 after admitting breaching Health and Safety guidelines over a failure to assess the risk the teenager may have been exposed to.

The jury of nine women and six men was told Mr Mclean’s broken neck and torn spinal cord were consistent with tumbling inside a machine.