A woman lay dying for three days in a crashed car next to her boyfriend’s body, an inquiry has ruled.
Lamara Bell, 25, could have survived if police had acted on a 101 call around five hours after the smash in July 2015, a judge ruled as he blasted Police Scotland’s ‘organisational failure’.
But the officer who took the call failed to log the report that a car had been seen in bushes at the bottom of an embankment beside the M9 near Bannockburn, Stirlingshire.
Sergeant Brian Henry had taken a written record of the call but did not log the information on the force computer system and there was no procedure for cross-checking whether action had been taken.
Instead, a badly injured Ms Bell was left in the wreckage beside the body of John Yuill. Police only responded following a second call three days later when a local farmer saw the Renault Clio and found the mother-of-one pleading for help. She died in hospital four days later.
Sheriff James Williamson said Ms Bell would have suffered ‘almost incomprehensible’ pain before her death.
In his determination after a fatal accident inquiry (FAI) into the incident, the judge said: ‘The failure of Police Scotland to properly risk assess the call handling procedures and have a system of reconciliation was an organisational failure. An organisational failure which led to the safety of the public being compromised and to the events of July 5, 2015.’
Lamara Bell, 25, could have survived if police had acted on a 101 call around five hours after the ‘devastatingly powerful collision’ in July 2015 – but instead she was left in the wreckage beside the body of John Yuill, 28
File photo from 2015 of police searching the scene at Junction 9 of the M9 near Stirling
Images show the car before the crash beside the M9 near Bannockburn
Police Scotland repeated their apology to the families of Mr Yuill and Ms Bell and said that ‘significant improvements’ have been made to call handling systems since 2015, which are now ‘incomparable’ to the systems in place at that time.
The inquiry heard Mr Yuill suffered unsurvivable injuries in the crash but Ms Bell would probably have survived if she had received medical treatment on July 5, albeit with a long-term neurological deficit.
But there was ‘no criticism’ of Mr Henry, now retired, who volunteered to do overtime at Bilston Glen, arriving into what the sheriff described as a ‘confused, fractious working environment’.
Instead, he said: ‘Brian Henry was inadequately trained and left largely unsupervised to operate a system that allowed for human error to go undetected.
‘His human error going undetected meant that Lamara Bell was left in a vehicle by the side of a major motorway in Scotland suffering devastating injures.
‘These injuries, together with the delay in rescuing and treating her, led to her death.’
Deputy Chief Constable Alan Speirs said: ‘Lamara Bell and John Yuill’s deaths were a tragedy and my first thoughts today are with their family and friends.
‘Police Scotland failed Lamara and John in 2015 and I repeat the personal apology made previously to their loved ones. We did not keep them safe in their time of need as was our duty and for that I am truly sorry.
‘We have fully participated with all inspections, investigations and inquiries established since July 2015 to identify what went wrong and to do everything we possibly can to stop a terrible incident such as this being repeated.
‘Sheriff Williamson’s findings highlight the significant improvements which have been made to our call handling systems. How we respond to 999 and 101 calls now is incomparable to how we dealt with them in 2015.
‘None of these provide consolation to Lamara and John’s loved ones, but I can give them my assurance that lessons have been learned and that the relentless improvement of service delivery lies at the heart of everything we do.
‘We are studying the determination in detail for any learning which will form part of this continuous improvement.’
The crashed car was discovered on July 8, 2015 after another member of the public rang police to report seeing it and emergency services went to investigate.
Sheriff Williamson found the incident was not the result of one individual failure by Police Scotland but ‘more than one and these failures took place over a lengthy period of time, during which the opportunity to resolve them was lost’.
Gordon Yuill, father of John Yuill, heard how failings by Police Scotland had ‘materially contributed’ to the death of Lamara Bell, following the crash on the M9 in 2015
The FAI came after the family of Ms Bell was awarded more than £1million in damages from Police Scotland in a civil settlement in December 2021.
In September 2021, the force was fined £100,000 at the High Court in Edinburgh after it pleaded guilty to health and safety failings which ‘materially contributed’ to Ms Bell’s death.
Sheriff Williamson said Ms Bell’s suffering over a period of three days, when she was severely injured but conscious, is ‘almost incomprehensible’.
He said that since the incident in 2015, the police Contact, Command and Control Division (C3 Division) has been transformed into an ‘efficient, tightly-controlled and sophisticated complex of service centres all capable of communicating with each other on a unified IT network’ that is better able to serve and protect the public than in 2015.
He said: ‘It is not risk-free. It still has a susceptibility to human failure, but the risk of human failure and that failure going undetected is now marginal.’
