A nurse who was on duty inside an English police station when a man died in custody went on trial for manslaughter this month — more than six years after the death, and about a year and a half after prosecutors decided to charge him.
Sean Cregg, now 35, of Newbury, Berkshire, was working as a custody nurse for Mountain Healthcare, a private company that provided custody medical staff to Thames Valley Police. On Jan. 8, 2020, officers brought 38-year-old William Cameron into Loddon Valley Police Station near Reading after his arrest. Prosecutors say Cameron had taken a mix of alcohol and drugs that night and became unresponsive and limp before he was placed in a cell. When a duty custody sergeant asked Cregg to look at him, prosecutors told jurors Cregg assumed Cameron was drunk and “faking” unconsciousness, and carried out what one prosecutor called “the most cursory and negligent examination.” Cameron died in hospital later that same day.
What prosecutors are arguing at trial
Cregg is charged with manslaughter by gross negligence and with a separate offense under Section 7 of the UK's Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which covers an employee's duty to take reasonable care for people affected by their work. He has pleaded not guilty to both counts. His trial opened Oct. 1 at London's Old Bailey and is expected to run for roughly seven weeks.
The case traces back to an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the body that reviews deaths and serious incidents involving UK police. The IOPC opened its inquiry the day Cameron died and spent more than a year on it before referring an evidence file to the Crown Prosecution Service in March 2021. Cregg was not formally charged until 2025 and did not enter his not-guilty plea until that July — a gap of more than four years between the death and the charge.
At trial, prosecutors told jurors that Cameron could not walk or talk before he was taken into the cell — a detail they argue should have told any trained nurse he needed urgent medical attention rather than a cursory look. The defense has not yet presented its case; Cregg denies both charges.
Custody nursing puts you in the same bind every shift: you're the only clinician in the building, the person in front of you may genuinely just be intoxicated, and the cost of getting it wrong in either direction is enormous. I've worked correctional health, and the instinct to write someone off as “just drunk” is exactly the instinct the job trains you to resist — because the signs of a life-threatening overdose, a head injury, or a medical emergency can look identical to intoxication until you actually assess the patient in front of you. A “cursory” check, if that is what the jury finds happened here, is not a shortcut. It is the whole job skipped.
What happens next
Cregg has not been convicted of anything. He denies both charges, and the trial — now underway and expected to run into November — will turn on what a jury decides a reasonable custody nurse should have done with the information in front of him that night. Cameron's family has pushed for accountability since 2020 with support from INQUEST, a UK charity that tracks deaths in state custody and has supported families in similar cases for decades. The Old Bailey trial is the first time the underlying facts will be tested in front of a jury, rather than reviewed only by investigators and prosecutors.
Gross negligence manslaughter in England and Wales carries no fixed sentence if convicted, and can range up to life imprisonment, with judges setting the term based on the facts a jury finds at trial.