Health trust vows to learn from ‘sad death’ of prisoner suddenly after release from Shropshire prison
A Shropshire health trust says it will work closely with a county prison to ‘fully learn’ from the unexpected death of a prisoner after his release.
Daniel Evans, aged 39, died on May 22, 2024 some six days after release into homelessness from Stoke Heath prison near Market Drayton.
He had told a probation officer that he thought contacting a council for accommodation would be ‘pointless’ and a ‘waste of time’, a fatal incident report said. There were staffing shortages at the time, it added.
A recently published report by Adrian Usher, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman said that a coroner in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent recorded that Mr Evans’s death was due to natural causes.
Mr Evans had a history of drug misuse and had been convicted of drug offences and was sentenced to two years and three months in prison in April 2022. He was released and recalled twice before being transferred to HMP Stoke Heath on August 3, 2023.
The PPO, which published Mr Usher’s report into the death on June 26, 2024, recorded that the clinical care that Mr Evans received at Stoke Heath was “not of a good standard and was not equivalent to that which he could have expected to receive in the community.
