AN INQUEST has heard how support workers battled in vain to save a York man after he had suffered an epileptic seizure in his bedroom at supported living accommodation.

Retired Mencap support worker Angela Stone wiped away tears yesterday as she told how she rang 999 and then took turns with a colleague, Jo Fannon, to perform CPR on Danny Tozer until paramedics arrived.

“It’s very, very stressful, a very draining experience,” she said. “One minute feels like forever.”

She also told how she subsequently realised that she hadn’t heard an alarm, linked to an epilepsy sensor under Danny’s mattress, go off.

“I couldn’t get my head round why we didn’t hear the alarm going off,” she said, adding that she and a manager went to Danny’s room to look at the sensor mat and found it was turned on.

“The mat was on, the light was green,” she said, adding that the manager had got on the bed and after a few seconds the alarm went off. She said the sensor was a new one and she trusted it. “I had more faith in it than the older one,” she said.

She also said that the alarm had gone off on previous occasions, but not when Danny was having a seizure, but while he was having a ‘private time’ in his bed, and the sensor had had to be tweaked.

“It was loud, like a fire alarm going off,” she said, adding that if a seizure went on for more than five minutes, the procedure was to call an ambulance.

Fellow support worker Jo Fannon, who found Danny unresponsive and raised the alarm, said a new sensor mat had been fitted about two weeks before.

Another worker, John Andrew, said he had checked the sensor the night before. He said the alarm had gone off ‘constantly’ one night previously.

Earlier this week, the inquest heard that Danny, 36, an autistic man with a severe learning disability, suffered a cardiac arrest after suffering the seizure in his bedroom while the door was shut in September 2015 at the house in Bishopthorpe, run by the charity Mencap. He died the next day at York Hospital.

The hearing continues today.