The son of a 19-stone Irishman who was allegedly suffocated by police told an Old Bailey jury yesterday that he was beaten up when he tried to help his father.
Mr Richard O'Brien jnr, now 19 but then 14, told how he saw his father disappear under a pile of police constables.
Constables Richard Ilett, Gary Lockwood and James Barber, all from Walworth Police Station, deny the manslaughter of Mr Richard O'Brien snr in April, 1994.
Mr O'Brien told the court that he and his father were waiting for his mother outside a Catholic Church social club in Walworth, London. There had been a disturbance at a dance in the hall and police had arrested two girls for fighting. They were clearing the area. A police officer insisted his father should move along even though he had explained why he was waiting. Words were exchanged between the two men. The officer pushed his father and he pushed back. "The officer signalled to other police officers to come over and said to my father: `You're nicked'," Mr O'Brien said. "He grabbed my father's wrist and others tried to get him down on the floor and the next thing I remember is that while he was on the floor police officers were surrounding him," Mr O'Brien said.
"There were four or five other officers around my father," Mr O'Brien continued. "All I could see were my father's feet and they were turned down as though he was lying on his stomach. My natural reaction was to help my father and I dived on top of the police officers trying to pull them off him."
Mr O'Brien said it was then that he was seized from behind and dragged away.
He described how he was also pushed to the ground and handcuffed with his hands behind his back. "Another officer stood on my ankles," he said.
As he lay there in the dark, Mr O'Brien continued, he could hear his father screaming: "Let me up. Let me up. I cannot breathe."
"My recollection now of my father's voice is that he was anxious, distressed," Mr O'Brien said.
Asked about the pushing that led to Mr O'Brien's arrest, his wife, Alison, told the court that he was the sort of man who often touched people when he was talking to them. She described it as "talking with his hands". She insisted her husband was not a man of violence and he had never hit her when drunk. She agreed with Mr Anthony Glass QC, defending Constable Ilett, that some years earlier he was arrested for assaulting her and fined £150 by a magistrate's court. The trial continues.