CCTV workers jailed for misusing mortuary footage of footballer Emiliano Sala and posting it on FB
A CCTV company director and her colleague who repeatedly accessed footage of Argentinian footballer Emiliano Sala's post-mortem and then snapped pics before sharing it on social media have been jailed for a total of 19 months.
Sala, 28, had just signed for Cardiff City FC in the English Premier League when the plane he was traveling to Wales crashed over the English Channel, north of Guernsey, on January 21.
After his body was recovered in early February, it was brought to Britain by boat and taken to Bournemouth Borough Mortuary for a post-mortem examination, following which the gruesome images of the procedure were leaked online.
The leak was traced to Sherry Bray, 49, the director of Camera Security Services Limited in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and her employee, Christopher Ashford, 62, both of whom admitted to the wrongdoing at the Swindon Crown Court in August, according to the Guardian.
Bray and Ashford had accessed the footage of the procedure being conducted on Sala multiple times outside the hours that the company is contracted to monitor the cameras and the images went viral after the former grabbed screenshots from the video and sent it to a family member on Facebook Messenger.
In a text exchange read out to the court by Rob Welling, prosecuting, a panicked Bray instructs her colleague to delete the pics on his phone after she was told by her daughter's boyfriend that the images were all over social media.
Both Bray and Ashford eventually pleaded guilty to three counts of computer misuse. Bray also admitted to perverting the course of justice by instructing Ashford to delete the pics on his phone, deleting the post-mortem cameras from the live feed camera facility and deleting the mortuary image of Sala from her phone.
In an emotional victim impact statement read out to the court on September 20, Sala's sister Romina said, "I'll never erase the images from my head. My brother and mother can never forget about this. It's hard for me to live with this image. I cannot believe there are people so wicked and evil who could do that."
On September 23, Bray was jailed for 14 months. Ashford, who was the one to access the footage, was jailed for five months.
Sentencing them, Judge Peter Crabtree said, "You were both driven by morbid curiosity. You have abused your positions and the access you had in a quite appalling way, in watching autopsies and in taking the photographs and screenshots you did."