Prison officer is sentenced over inmate suicide

A PRISON worker who faked records to try to cover his tracks after he failed to properly check on a high-risk inmate who later killed himself has been given a suspended jail sentence.

Graham Evans, 67, from Kings Heath, failed to carry out the expected number of checks on vulnerable prisoner Mesut Olgun before he took his own life. Evans then fabricated records to make it look like he had done his job correctly.

The prison support worker should have checked on the 30-year-old, from Bristol, four times an hour while on a night shift in June 2018. But he left Olgun unsupervised for “significant periods of time” before he was found dead at HMP Hewell near Redditch.

The worker was caught when CCTV footage showed he had carried out fewer than half the expected number of checks – just 15.

Olgun was arrested after a violent struggle in Bromyard, Herefordshire, in which he stabbed a police officer and a police dog before harming himself. He had been assessed as extremely high-risk in prison.

Evans was given a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for 12 months, at Worcester Crown Court after being found guilty of misconduct in public office. He was also ordered to carry out 80 hours of unpaid work and pay £7,500 in prosecutions costs.

Rosemary Ainslie, head of the Crown Prosecution Service Special Crime Division, said: “It was Evans’ responsibility to carry out all the required welfare checks. He failed to carry out the number of required checks and fabricated the records.

“The jury concluded that his actions amounted to serious misconduct.”