Olivia Burt: Durham University student's death outside club ‘senseless and avoidable’, court told

A student’s death when she was crushed by a decorative screen while queuing outside a nightclub has been called “senseless and avoidable” by prosecutors.

Olivia Burt, a 20-year-old life sciences first year student at Durham University, suffered severe head injuries outside Missoula bar in the city in February 2018.

The venue, now called the Slug and Lettuce, was full of student sports teams on a Wednesday night and a crowd had gathered outside, waiting to get in.

Stonegate, the UK’s biggest pub owner, is on trial at Teesside Crown Court charged with a single count of breaching health and safety legislation.

It was cleared of three other charges following a ruling by the judge.

The remaining charge relates to the same heavy decorative screen falling earlier on the same evening, but it was lifted back into place.

Jamie Hill KC, summarising the prosecution case brought by Durham County Council, said: “It is perhaps difficult to understand how it is that a 20-year-old woman could die in such a senseless and avoidable way.

“All she was doing was standing with her friends, waiting to get in to a club which had targeted the student population as a way of filling their venue on Wednesday nights.”

Ms Burt, from Milford on Sea, in Hampshire, was described as an "innocent woman" who had done "nothing wrong".

Mr Hill added: “She deserved to be protected by a large organisation that had a lot of written policies.

“It had risk assessments covering just about everything, policies that were supposed to cover all reasonably foreseeable eventualities.

“But the reality is that as soon as the venue, which had become the first choice venue for students on a Wednesday night, was confronted with more customers than they could accommodate within their own set limits, all of the planning and all the risk assessments came to nought.”

Mr Hill said staff could have moved the crowd away and told them there would be a delay in getting in, but instead “they just queued them up and let the numbers swell”.

Once the screen first fell at 11:17pm that night, “it was entirely foreseeable it could go again”, which it did at around 11:48pm, killing Ms Burt.

Prashant Popat KC, defending Stonegate, described the case as a “tragedy”, adding: “It is absolutely extraordinary that a young life could be lost whilst doing something so ordinary.

“The fact that a tragedy occurred does not mean the defendant must have committed a crime.”

Mr Popat said Stonegate could not have reasonably done more and had hired Phoenix Security, “one of the best in the business”, to manage customers waiting to get in.

Judge Howard Crowson gave jurors a route to verdict, so they must be sure the decorative screen was being used as a barrier; that it was not designed to be used that way; that this caused a real risk and that risk arose from Stonegate’s activity.

If the jury is sure of those questions, it should then consider if it is more likely than not that Stonegate took all “reasonably practical” steps to prevent it.

The judge sent the jury out to start deliberating its verdict on Wednesday afternoon.

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