Failures contributed to prisoner’s death, says inquest jury

An inquest jury has found a catalogue of failures inside Wandsworth Prison contributed to the death of a teenage Lithuanian who hanged himself in his segregation block cell. Eighteen-year-old Osvaldas Pagirys was in prison for stealing sweets and wanted in his home country for mobile phone theft. The Prisons Ombudsman described a 37-minute delay in answering the distressed boy’s cell alert bell as “unacceptable” in a case she described as appalling.