Four face charges over death of lawyer hit by window frame
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Version 0 of 1. Four people face charges of manslaughter by gross negligence over the death of a lawyer crushed by a half-tonne window frame as she walked through central London three years ago. Amanda Telfer, 44, died after the 13ft x 13ft wooden frame, which had been propped up against a wall at a building site, fell and pinned her to the ground in Hanover Street, central London. Bystanders lifted the frame off her and tried to resuscitate her before paramedics arrived, but Telfer, from Bermondsey, south London, was pronounced dead at the scene just before midday on 30 August 2012. Damian Lakin-Hall, 48, of Cobham, Surrey; Claire Gordon, 35, of Leeds, West Yorkshire; Kelvin Adsett, 63, of Slough, Berkshire; and Steve Rogers, 61, from Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, have been summoned to appear at Westminster magistrates court next Tuesday, 9 September, to face charges of manslaughter by gross negligence and breaching general duty at work. They are set to appear alongside representatives of I S Europe Ltd, from Slough, Westgreen Construction Ltd, from Richmond, Surrey, and Leeds-based Drawn Metal Ltd. All are charged with breaching general duty of care to an employee and breaching general duty of care to a non-employee. The summonses come after a three-year investigation into Telfer’s death by the Metropolitan police’s homicide and major crime command and the Health and Safety Executive. An inquest into her death remains open and adjourned. A postmortem gave the cause of her death as blunt force trauma. A specialist in intellectual property and media law, Telfer had been on her way to work at Keystone Law in Davies Street, near Oxford Street, when she was killed. Since 2005, she had also been a volunteer investigator for Reprieve, a charity helping Guantánamo Bay inmates and people facing the death penalty around the world. She had helped represent British-born Neil Revill, 40, who had faced a possible death sentence for the double murder of a drug dealer and his girlfriend in California in 2001. He was eventually sentenced to life after a trial in 2012. Shortly after her death, one Keystone Law colleague described Telfer as a “terribly kind and straightforward person”. |