A 23-year-old Liverpool fan who was killed along with his two friends at the Hillsborough football ground in 1989 died after his airway became too blocked with vomit for him to be resuscitated, the new inquests into the disaster have heard.
David Thomas travelled to see the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest on 15 April 1989 with brothers Christopher and Kevin Traynor, aged 26 and 16, who were also killed in the crush. Three other friends with whom they travelled had been allocated seats at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, but Thomas and the Traynor brothers all had tickets to stand on the Leppings Lane terrace.
Their friends last saw the three alive when they went their separate ways to get into the ground, and Thomas and the Traynor brothers went to a fish and chip shop, the inquests heard. Thomas’s daughter, Debbie, was present in the converted courtroom in Warrington, hearing more harrowing evidence about the horror at Hillsborough when dead bodies and critically injured people were being dragged out of the pens.
BBC footage was shown of failed efforts by Sheffield Wednesday’s club doctor, William Purcell, and off-duty nurse David Evans – who was at the match as a Liverpool supporter – to revive her father on the pitch at 3.27pm.
Purcell, who has since died, said in a statement after the disaster: “I told a police constable to bring any asphyxiated people he could find to the area where we were … Within a short space of time, there were a number of people who were asphyxiated laid on the ground around us.”
He said hundreds of people were in the immediate area where he was working, next to a line of policemen dragging people out, and he said they worked on a person “until such time as it seemed there was no real prospect of them breathing unaided again”, then moved on to the next person.
Purcell believed they worked on Thomas for “quite a long time”. His Brook airway – a device for unblocking a person’s windpipe – “proved useless” because Thomas’s had very quickly become blocked with vomit, he said.
Ambulance officer Anthony Boyington, giving evidence in person, said that given his 20 years’ experience, it took him only 30 seconds to judge Thomas to be dead, because he had no pulse and was not breathing or showing other signs of life.
Boyington’s ambulance took Thomas to Sheffield’s Northern General hospital with another unnamed casualty, who was still alive but very seriously injured, showing signs of brain damage, whom Boyington and his fellow ambulance officer, Graham Smith, worked on during the journey.
When they arrived at the hospital, the other person was taken to the resuscitation area, but Thomas was taken straight to an orthopaedic clinic being used as a temporary mortuary, the inquests heard.
A doctor, Janet Doore, pronounced Thomas and 10 other people dead in the clinic, then later he was taken back to the gymnasium at the Hillsborough ground which police were using as a mortuary. At 2.55am Thomas’s father, Henry, formally identified the dead body of his son.
The clothes Thomas wore to the match were shown in a photograph on the screens in the court: blue jeans and a white sweatshirt, which appeared to be smeared with blood. A testament to Thomas from his brother-in-law was read to the court, in which he was described as “quiet, predictable, and the type of person who would take the shirt off his back to use as a bandage if it was necessary”.
The inquests continue.
