Putney Pusher suspect found dead, according to reports

[Fartughtyred]

Goodness me, wasn't expecting that.

Also, the police did not name the individual. There are any number of ways the identifying details could have got out: via neighbours, via the original informant/ source, and of course unauthorised leaks. But pinning a leak on the Met, as the sisters are doing, and saying they tipped off the press to attend the arrest, seems a bold move.

I guess if someone planned to commit murder, an intelligent person might have avoided doing it in their own backyard so where he lived in relation to where the incident took place, when it was only short drive away is irrelevant.

Driving by car from Notting Hill to Putney (depending on where he parked) could have taken less than 30 minutes at 7.00am in 2017 before the 20mph limit was in place from 2020.

Remember the culprit actually ran back along the bridge again after knowing full well what he'd done.

That level of arrogance and uninhibited risk taking is quite extraordinary. A normal person wouldn't push someone in front of a bus anyway, but usually a opportunistic attacker would try to flee the scene.

It looks like he went back to check if the bus got her.

Kind of fits with 'not noticing' he'd hit a cyclist with a motorbike IMO.

Have the police even publicly confirmed they had traceable DNA from the victim?

Touch DNA could easily have been compromised by people touching the victims coat/clothes or brushing it as they helped her up, medical checks etc.

Not really. Police will investigate people who could have been implicated.

They aren't speculatively matching a huge catalogue of suspects based on their physical similarity to a grainy CCTV image.

The police will have evidence that has not been made public- including on where the horrible fella went after the incident on the bridge. London is absolutely covered in CCTV.

I would have thought checking that the suspect was in the country at the time of the incident was a basic due diligence step prior to arresting them.

They may knock on the door, but to go as far as arresting someone, and to not let them off the hook again.. they need more than a tip off.

Mm.

This is the sort of thing that seems simple and obvious to us commoners, but is far from it in reality.

Checking someone is in/ recently left the country. How do you go about that practically?

You’re going to need CCTV data from the airport they flew out of; the passenger manifest; the airside check in records, the landing and immigration data from the target airport.

The police arent gonna just go, “ok, dude says he was in Chicago or wherever on x date”.

On the issues of why he would be running that far away and that far, I think I can speak to that. When I lived in London my friends and I would run the bridges. There are a lot of Londoners who chose to run on towpaths etc as part of their route because it's such a beautiful change of scenery, flat, and a lot of it isn't paved
I'd been unsurprised by the idea of running down from Notting Hill to Hammersmith bridge, crossing, running the towpath, back over Putney bridge, and through bishops Park back to Hammersmith.

Meanwhile, DH is in his 50s, and still runs part of the journey to/from work at least once a week, for about 8 miles from the suburbs into a different capital city.

A fit man in his 20s or 30s with an army background could easily do that on a Tuesday.

I've no idea if this is him, but I'd completely reject the alibi that it's too far for a morning run. I used to run about 5 miles a couple of mornings a week at 5am to get my miles in, in my 20s. Obviously now I know better.

Police can check if someone is currently in the country in a matter of seconds using integrated border and law enforcement databases. Maybe they couldn't in 2017 but I can't imagine it was that much harder than it is today

Editing - checking if someone was in the country on a particular day is more like a few days process, so maybe standard process is to do post arrest rather than pre arrest. Which seems unfortunate with the speed of social media spreading mud.

This whole thing freaks me out a bit - it seems someone said it was him (an ex maybe) and he looks a bit like a grainy picture. Then he needs to prove it wasn't him? How would you even do that 9 years later. If it was me I was possibly doing nothing at home with no-one to back that up. Where do you start? Just because he had drugs and had a previous incident doesn't mean he did this. And at the same time police probably can't prove it either way, so he would have it hanging over his head forever, with the majority of people convinced it was him.

You only need their passport.

well you arrest them,
they say they are out of the country,
and you find proof,, so you release them without charge

Have the family shown a picture of their brother’s “withered leg’ ? surely if it was a significant injury, that would immediately clear it up as the pusher didn’t have a withered leg.

And if they exwife gave his name to police based on nothing but spite then she has his blood on her hands in my view. Be interesting to know why she put his name forward.

the reporting says it was a third party who contacted the police - someone who knows his ex wife from his second marriage. But there must be more to this than a disgruntled person naming him. The police would have carried out background checks and investigation between the tip off and deciding to make the arrest. There were two months between the two events, during which they spoke to the ex wife and quite possibly a range of other people. Obviously the general public don’t know what other evidence there is besides the tip off.

You may be right idk but the important part was that person didn’t have his identity in the public domain.

The police might be doing the right things but the difference with this next man was the media or someone cobbled together his identity.

The naming didn’t come from the ex wife. Though I completely agree with you that if a malicious allegation is made, the perpetrator should be charged. But in this case, the police must have had reasonable suspicion that it could be this man which led to his arrest, and the subsequent further investigations

Please don’t make these judgements about the character of people who die by suicide. It’s really distressing to many people who are bereaved by suicide. It used to be a commonplace belief that suicide is the “cowards way out” - now it is thought that people’s motives and state of mind are far more complex.

What do you mean?

He doesn't/didn't need to prove it wasn't him, and if all they had was the word of one person and nothing else conclusive there's a good chance no charges would ever have been brought. If the police drop a matter, you get told that eventually. Unfortunately the wheels do turn very slowly at the moment, years of underfunding. But I've thought all along that if it turned out to be he said/other person said, him just saying of course I can't prove what I was doing on a random morning 9 years ago because who the fuck can would be persuasive.

His problem was that the arrest was leaked to the press, and also that it turned out he had drugs in his house. So even if someone else had come forward and admitted to being the pusher the next week, he was still likely to get done for possession of Class A and the arrest apparently led to him being suspended at work.

Agree, well said.

Actually his biggest problem was the on line hate campaign against him. Lots of folk see no need for criminal proceedings, or weighing the evidence, or "beyond reasonable doubt" before deciding a person is guilty. Just take a look up thread.

Not my job to present evidence to the defence. Unless you want to pay me. :)

If he was not a suspect in 2017, and was not interviewed or anything, as it seems .....he's changed job since then.....so how did he, or his family, get access to an email he sent that day, at that time, to allegedly prove his innocence?

If he was in the same job, it would of course be far easier.

He could do a subject access request I suppose - he was lucky if that found anything useful. His previous employer must have been very keen to help. I wonder if the police had spoken to them at all.

Well, no. Having class As and Bs in the house with a very young child resident was also quite a big problem of his own making, as was the previous hit and run. You can’t externalise it all.

Yes. Predictably there’s been one or two posts minimising that… We don’t know whether the guy is the ‘Putney Pusher‘ but we do know he had previous form for hitting a woman with his motorbike and riding off. I would assume the evidence about drug possession was pretty conclusive too. Clearly the guy didn’t give a shit about the human trafficking, sexual violence and other crimes connected to the drugs trade…