Police have arrested a man over the theft of a defibrillator from Roehampton Methodist Church last month.
The man was arrested on Roehampton Lane on 27 July after a member of the public recognised him in the street and alerted police officers. He has yet to be charged.
The defibrillator was taken on just over a month ago, a shock discovery that frustrated local residents on the Alton Estate.
Photographs taken by Putney.news the day after theft at Minstead Gardens showed the yellow cabinet that housed the defibrillator still bolted to the wall. Its keypad lock, which callers unlock by dialling 999 for the code, shows no sign of forcing. Inside, the cabinet was empty and the wiring exposed.
How the device came out of a code-locked box that shows no visible damage has not been explained.
The defibrillator was funded through the Department of Health and Social Care’s London Hearts scheme, which pays for public defibrillators across the country.
Roehampton is not short of defibrillators on paper. The British Heart Foundation’s national register lists ten others within a kilometre of the church, part of a network of 254 across the whole of Wandsworth. Most are restricted to certain buildings or hours; only two, besides the church’s own, are marked for free public access around the clock. The nearest is about 120 metres away, outside Penwood House on Tunworth Crescent.
Devices like this exist because early defibrillation, alongside CPR, roughly doubles a person’s chance of surviving a cardiac arrest outside hospital, and every minute’s delay cuts the odds further. Fewer than one in ten people who suffer one currently survive in the UK. Registering a defibrillator on the Circuit, the national database run by the British Heart Foundation with NHS ambulance services, is what allows a 999 call handler to send a bystander straight to the nearest working machine.
