Teenager killed himself in prison after getting deportation letter

A 19-year-old killed himself at a youth prison after being told he could be deported to a country he had not lived in since he was four, a jury has found. Slovakian-born Ondrej Suha, who had just started a 14-month sentence for burglary and assault, had also witnessed his cellmate attempting to take his life a few days earlier. Suha had tried to kill himself twice the month before he died and had told staff at Brinsford young offender institution in Wolverhampton he no longer wanted to live. But he was taken off suicide watch the day after his unsuccessful suicide attempts by a prison officer who later said he did not know that Suha had tied two separate ligatures.
The teenager from Walsall, who thought of himself as “British through and through”, was discovered hanged in his cell on 21 December 2015, shortly after receiving a letter from the Home Office telling him he was liable to be deported to Slovakia after his sentence, despite having lived in the UK since he was four years old. He was taken to New Cross hospital in Wolverhampton but died on Christmas Day. The prison officer who served Suha with the papers told the hearing that he would have preferred to do this during the core prison day rather than shortly before lock-up.
An inquest jury in Stafford found that Suha’s death was caused by being told that he could be deported just before being locked away for the night, and therefore outside of the “core day”. Prison medical records revealed that no one began cardiopulmonary resuscitation until a nurse arrived seven minutes after the teenager was found. During the six-day inquest it also emerged that the prison had delayed calling an ambulance, in breach of national rules.
The senior coroner for South Staffordshire, Andrew Haigh, said he would be writing to the head of the National Offender Management Service because he was concerned that inadequate training for night staff and a national policy allowing prisons to operate with only one CPR-trained member of staff on duty at any one time could lead to other deaths.
Suha’s sister, Andrea Suhova, said: “Our family has been devastated by losing Ondrej. Knowing that more could have been done to protect him has only made our pain worse.