10 things the Daily Mail got wrong about the trial of Mark Alexander Mistake #2

[Nicholas]

We know that Sami had a temper. Another thought is that he had an argument with those who were doing the building work and collapsed and died.  They may have panicked especially if they werent working legally and found it easier to bury him rather than report it. This is certainly a possibility.

Mark said Sami was "bed bound" so this couldn't be a possibility.

[Nicholas]

Mark “battered his father to death.”
Police discovered Samuel’s “dismembered body and battered skull.”
Samuel died “having suffered blows to the head.”

-   Excerpts from the Daily Mail et al

We simply don’t know how my father died.  The Home Office Pathologist was “unable to formally ascribe a cause of death. I give a cause 1a unascertained.”  There were signs of bruising and fractures to his skull, but it was impossible to say whether these in fact caused my father’s death, and if they did, whether they were the result of third party assault or just an accident:

“We cannot say whether the deceased in fact suffered an unnatural death” – Home Office Pathologist.

“There was no evidence of any decomposing blood clot within the cranial cavity. This would be a common accompaniment to severe head injury and often persist even when there is severe decomposition” – Consultant Forensic Pathologist.

Things were made considerably more complicated when a Scenes of Crime Officer later revealed that he had somehow smashed my father’s skull with a pneumatic kangol drill, completely undermining the pathologists’ findings:

“It appears that the pneumatic drill or kangol I was required to use had caused damage to the skull of the deceased” – Scenes of Crime Officer

“At the head was some artefactual damage that I understand was occasioned during the course of the extraction of the body” – Home Office Pathologist.

In the end, the Home Office Pathologist admitted that:

“I can’t completely rule out that those fractures occurred after death.”

While his superior confirmed that:

“It cannot be determined whether any skull fracturing occurred in life.  Some may be the result of striking by a drill…some a consequence of heat and brittleness of bone” – Consultant Forensic Pathologist.

Though as a family we feel it would be undignified and inappropriate to release the full post mortem analysis, I have already posted a copy of the Home Office Pathologist’s basic findings, as well as the subsequent admission – 4 months later – by the Scenes of Crime Officer who struck my father’s skull with the pneumatic drill

Very telling especially the use of the words innapropriate and undignified

[Fact Checker]

Where in the surveyor's report/recommendations does it say anything about filling a hole to ground level with such a huge amount of concrete which achieves very little?

This is a fair point Myster, but remember that this site wasn't unique. There were two others like it. The method Sami used may have been superfluous to requirements, but it was consistent on all three sites. Sami had ignored the surveyor's advice to begin with, and the planning permission itself, which only allowed him to remove one tree, not three. Mark was simply following instructions, and without expertise in this area he wasn't to know whether what he had been asked to do was strictly necessary from an engineering perspective or not.

http://www.freemarkalexander.org/gallery

[Fact Checker]

Mark said Sami was "bed bound" so this couldn't be a possibility.

Hi Nicholas, please see our response on a number of other threads to this point.We know that Sami was no longer bed-bound by early 2009:

http://www.freemarkalexander.org/faq/#health
http://www.freemarkalexander.org/mistake-10

Sami was admitted to hospital 23 May 2008, and was bed-bound for several months, during which time Mark cared for him and helped him regain his strength. He was fully mobile by early 2009, as recognised by the judge in his sentencing remarks: "There is clear evidence before the court that by the time of this offence Sami had made a reasonably good recovery from the illness he had suffered"