6th anniversary of the death of William Tonou-Mbobda – We accuse!

William Tonou Mbobda was killed on April 21, 2019, in front of the UKE Psychiatry Clinic by security guards from the UKE subsidiary Klinik Logistik & Engineering GmbH, who illegally and illegally restrained him in a prone position. The security guards surrounded the patient, who was sitting peacefully and smoking, and ordered him to return to the ward immediately. One of the three security guards grabbed him by the shoulder from behind. When Tonou When Mbobda stood up and tried to resist the attack, the three men brought him to the ground together, laid him on his stomach and made him kneel on his back so that his hands could be forcibly tied behind his back.

Tonou Mbobda suffered a fatal cardiac arrhythmia and was declared dead 6 days later.

The Hamburg public prosecutor’s office has closed the investigation with unspeakable reasons – to date, the UKE has not apologized to the bereaved families or compensated for any necessary expenses.

Therefore, we accuse:

1. We accuse the violent security staff of the UKE subsidiary Klinik Logistik & Engineering GmbH of having jointly killed our brother Tonou-Mbobda on April 21, 2019, by securing his arms behind his back in a prone position and adding at least some of their body weight to his weight. They thus knowingly accepted the possibility of the victim’s death by positional suffocation.
2. We accuse the responsible ward physician at the UKE Psychiatry Department, Dr. Ch . Sauer, of unlawfully ordering the violent, involuntary commitment of brother Tonou-Mbobda without a court order for commitment and of subsequently failing to provide medical supervision. We accuse her of failing to take seriously the concerns raised by Tonou-Mbobda during his voluntary inpatient stay regarding taking a prescribed medication due to known allergic reactions. In this context, the traumatic loss of his brother due to an allergic reaction to a medication should have been a necessary reason for offering an alternative treatment strategy. We also accuse her of failing to diagnose the serious congenital heart defect, which was only discovered during a later forensic examination, during a thorough admission examination to rule out possible physical causes of his psychological overload.
3. We accuse the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the UKE of having prevented the diagnosis of a potentially fatal , congenital heart disease despite several pathological ECG findings by failing to consult a specialist cardiologist and of having ignored an additional low potassium level in the deceased’s blood.
4. We accuse the Medical Director of the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Prof. Dr. Gallinat , of giving false testimony before the Citizens‘ Assembly’s Scientific Committee on August 18, 2020, by claiming that all ECGs—including those from previous stays and from other clinics—were „unremarkable,“ even though they had already been marked as „pathological ECGs“ by the computer analysis. He also claimed that the lethal restraint used to facilitate the compulsory treatment ordered by the ward physician, Ch . Sauer, was allegedly not a „medical measure“ under Section 12 of the HmbPsychKG ( Medical Treatment Act) and therefore “ no medical supervision obligation“ existed.
5. We further accuse the UKE Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, as well as the UKE as a whole, of never having offered psychological support to the surviving relatives of Tonou-Mbobda, who died under their care . At no time were the family members given a personally comprehensible explanation of how and why their son, brother, and cousin had to die violently. We accuse the fact that to this day, no expression of sympathy has been personally addressed or conveyed to the family by the responsible clinic or the UKE.
6. We accuse the UKE of having publicly and in violation of medical confidentiality painted a stigmatizing image of the deceased as an ‚aggressive patient‘ in order to deceive the public about its own responsibility for significant negligence, the unlawful use of force, and for the patient’s death.
7. We accuse the Department of Intensive Care Medicine at the UKE of failing to conduct a necessary, timely external forensic examination and documentation of the injuries caused by the restraint force on April 21, 2019, despite our express advice, or of only initiating this several days late.
8. We accuse the UKE Institute of Forensic Medicine of having accepted and conducted the autopsy order under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Klaus Püschel, despite the existence of an obvious conflict of interest due to his affiliation with the responsible company, the UKE. Furthermore, we accuse Prof. Dr. Klaus Püschel and his autopsy team of having prepared a one-sided autopsy report, completely omitting any discussion of a probable positional asphyxiation, as well as of having breached their duty of care by failing to diagnose a serious heart condition despite repeated pathological ECG findings. This omission confirms the alleged conflict of interest both professionally and factually.
9. We accuse the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office of closing the investigation into the Tonou-Mbobda homicide without filing charges. We further accuse the public prosecutor’s office of awarding the autopsy contract to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the UKE despite a clear conflict of interest . The involvement of an external forensic pathologist under the direction of Prof. Dr. Püschel was neither suitable nor appropriate to eliminate or neutralize this conflict of interest.
10. We accuse the investigating public prosecutor, L. Mahnke, of having constructed a reversal of the perpetrator-victim relationship by neglecting the violations of the existing S3 guideline of the German Society for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Neurology (DGPPN) „Prevention of Coercion: Prevention and Therapy of Aggressive Behavior in Adults,“ by neglecting the victim’s right to self-determination and self-defense, and by the inappropriate assumption of an „intention to save lives“ regarding the incompetent and escalatory approach of the security staff. Furthermore, in a professionally unjustifiable manner, he excluded the possibility of a positional suffocation by asserting the technically untenable precondition of an allegedly necessary restraint duration of 20-25 minutes.
11. We accuse the UKE as a company and the UKE Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy for failing to provide effective training for its employees on the topics of positional asphyxiation and the contents of the S3 guideline of the German Society for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Neurology „Prevention of Coercion“ dated September 10, 2018. There is no other explanation for the fatal actions of the security guards on April 21, 2019, against our brother Tonou-Mbobda , or for the objectively incorrect assessments by UKE employees regarding the supposedly „professional“ or „appropriate“ actions of the security guards .
12. We accuse the UKE as a company of not having established effective and protected reporting options for racist or other inhumane incidents at the time of the fatal incident, or of not having adapted such a system to actual requirements .
13. Furthermore, we accuse the UKE of not having provided a responsible mechanism for dealing with medically caused deaths or injuries for relatives, as this was demonstrably not done in the present case.
14. We accuse the UKE as an organization of having—if any—only a rudimentary understanding of the interpersonal and institutionalized mechanisms of racism and, furthermore, a completely inappropriate culture of error. The UKE was neither able to adequately address the failures related to the death of our brother Tonou-Mbobda nor to deal respectfully and thoughtfully with his surviving relatives and friends.

Our demands:

We call on the UKE to apologize to the bereaved family in an appropriate and personal manner for the death of William Tonou-Mbobda and to reimburse the costs incurred for the repatriation and burial of the body.

We call on people of African descent to join us today in remembering our brother William Tonou-Mbobda and his family. We urge you to support the family with all your strength in their fight for clarification and justice, and to raise awareness of this case beyond Germany’s borders, and especially in Africa.

We call on the solidarity-based civil society in Hamburg and throughout Germany to recognize and support the struggles of Black communities in Germany for the investigation of institutionalized murders of Black and otherwise racialized people. It is the task of the German majority society to combat the systemic racism within it, its authorities, and its institutions through implicit prejudices, racial To effectively counteract profiling , special laws, restrictions on benefits for asylum seekers, exclusion and illegalisation and, in particular, prejudice-based treatment and jurisprudence.

The violent death of Tonou-Mbobda is not an isolated incident!

The fact that Black people repeatedly die, are seriously injured, or are disadvantaged as a result of the responsibility or irresponsibility of German institutions and authorities is, unfortunately, a bitter and daily experience in our communities – including and especially here in Hamburg:

Achidi John died at the UKE Institute of Forensic Medicine – he was killed by Prof. Dr. Ute Lockemann forcibly injecting emetics into his lungs instead of his stomach …

In 2014, Francis Kwame died on the streets of Hamburg after surviving the 2011 Libyan war, the escape across the Mediterranean, and the hopelessness of Italy…

Yaya died in 2016 Jabbi in the Hahnöversand Prison in Hamburg. The prison administration announced that Yaya allegedly killed herself by hanging in her cell, even though there had been no indication of this shortly beforehand…

In 2017, Ghanaian Obang A.A. was shot by a plainclothes police officer and then left lying there without any assistance for more than 15 minutes until the ambulance arrived…

In 2019, William Tonou-Mbobda died due to illegal, irregular, and inappropriate restraint in front of the psychiatric ward at the UKE…

… and for none of these known deaths and the many other injuries has anyone ever been held accountable or appropriately accountable!

Touch ONE – Touch ALL

#JusticeForMbobda​

Stop Killing Black People!