Kelly Hartigan-Burns, 35, died in December 2016 after being treated with “reckless indifference”, activists say, by Blackburn police. She was arrested after members of the public spotted her late at night getting in and out of traffic in her pajamas saying she wanted to die. Her family fought for an interrogation, believing she had failed the Lancashire Police Department at every level, from the control room to the response on the street, at her home and at the police station. A jury in the Preston Medical Examiner’s Court agreed, concluding that “if the officers had shown more compassion, they had acted diligently, practiced common sense, followed instructions and procedure from the moment they found Kelly and throughout its detention, there may have been a different result “. The jury came to an open conclusion, with a narrative detailing a series of failures that were said to have contributed to her death. In October 2021, a gross misdemeanor was found against Jason Marsden, the sergeant involved in the Hartigan-Burns case, forbidding him from returning to police work. Following her arrest late on December 3, 2016, police transported Hartigan-Burns home to her partner, Cal, who was a mental health nurse. Cal warned police she was at risk of suicide, and police records show five separate mental health incidents involving Hartigan-Burns last year. But instead of using their mental health forces to transport Hartigan-Burns to a safe place, police arrested her for a joint assault that sparked an altercation with Cal that night. Her mental health history was not taken into account when she was put in a cell without a closed circuit television and she was left alone when the sergeant left two hours earlier without checking her. His colleagues did not check him until he was found indifferent in the cell and taken to the hospital where he died. Kelly’s mother, June Hartigan, said: “For the last five years we have been tormented by what we knew must have happened, by all the things the police did wrong and by all the ways in which Kelly could have been saved. . “While it helps to hear that the jury could see the same level of offense, the fact that it took five years to reach this stage means that it is a hollow victory.” Deborah Coles, director of the Inquest campaign, said: “Kelly was a woman in a mental health crisis who needed care and specialist support, not care. “The police treated her anxiety, vulnerability and the risk of suicide with reckless indifference.”
