The only person to stand trial over the death of Travis Alexander Ebanks was acquitted in the Grand Court on 2 October. He is the surgeon who tried to save him.

A seven-member jury found Dr Paul Taiganides, 63, a former Health Services Authority (HSA) surgeon, not guilty of manslaughter after two and a half days of deliberation. The verdict was unanimous and came as Justice Cheryll Richards was preparing to direct the jurors that she would accept a majority. The charge was manslaughter by unlawful act or omission. The trial, first listed for 5 May, began on 7 September and ran for four weeks; the jury retired on 30 September.

Mr Ebanks, 29, of West Bay, was shot in the neck and chest on King Road, West Bay, shortly before 4am on 21 January 2024, and was taken by ambulance to what was then the Cayman Islands Hospital in George Town, now the Anthony S. Eden Hospital. The RCIPS said that morning that he had been "found with what appeared to be gunshot wounds to the chest" and asked the public to avoid the area. He was the first person killed in Cayman that year. No one has been charged with shooting him.

A jury gives no reasons. The verdict means the Crown did not make the jurors sure that Dr Taiganides caused the death through gross negligence. It is not a finding about where the breathing tube at the centre of the trial was when he inserted it, and it is not a finding about anyone else who treated Mr Ebanks that morning.

What the trial leaves behind is an account, given in open court over four weeks, of how a gunshot victim was handled in Cayman between a 911 call and a surgeon's arrival at the bedside. With the criminal case over, that account sits with the HSA, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP), the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service (RCIPS) and the Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability. As of 14 October, no statement on the verdict and no announcement of a review appeared on the published news pages of the HSA, the ODPP or the RCIPS. The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) was not in court; the account of the evidence below is drawn from the published reports of the proceedings by the Cayman Compass and Cayman News Service between 8 September and 3 October.

What the jury heard

The Crown, led by Richard Matthews KC, said a chest X-ray taken in the trauma room showed the tube in Mr Ebanks's oesophagus rather than his windpipe, and his stomach distended with gas. It said he had been conscious and responding to the ambulance crew, and that the failure to recognise the error was, in Mr Matthews's words in his closing speech on 25 September, a "truly exceptionally bad" breach that starved him of oxygen and killed him within minutes. The Crown relied on a police constable who said he heard another doctor in the room say the tube had gone behind where it should have been. Professor Charles Deakin, the Crown's principal expert, told the court the wounds were serious but not inevitably fatal, that the bleeding could have been controlled by chest drainage, and that with a correctly placed and properly checked tube Mr Ebanks had a real prospect of survival. The Crown's experts said a tube left in the oesophagus is "non-survivable" without prompt correction and that capnography, which measures exhaled carbon dioxide, is the gold standard for confirming that a patient is breathing through the tube. Mr Matthews told the jury that the surgeon's note at 5:36am recording "proper placement" was not a natural reading of the X-ray. The jury was shown X-ray images taken while Mr Ebanks was alive and after his death, and heard from hospital staff, the pathologist, police officers and intubation experts.

Dr Taiganides, defended by Ben Tonner KC, said he had performed thousands of intubations, that he placed the tube correctly, that the checks made at the time, including direct visualisation, capnography and chest rise, supported that, and that it was probably dislodged later, when the patient was moved for the X-ray. The defence said any sign missed on the small, transient X-ray image came as the patient was deteriorating into cardiac arrest. The defence said oxygen saturation rose temporarily to 90% after the intubation, which it said showed the tube was in the right place. Another doctor in the room, called by the Crown, told the court he had also carried out checks and believed the tube was correctly placed. Dr Taiganides told the jury the wounds were not survivable. Dr Fred Simon, the defence expert, agreed with the pathologist that Mr Ebanks suffered brain swelling and herniation, and said no one survives herniation; the defence argued that the Crown had to prove his life would have been "significantly prolonged" with correct intubation, a threshold it said the experts could not meet. The defence said the constable's account was unreliable, contained timeline errors and was contradicted by CCTV on one point, a claim that the surgeon had hidden his badge.

The defence also described the conditions in the trauma room, and the published reports of the trial do not record the Crown disputing that description. Mr Ebanks had been shot roughly an hour before he reached the hospital, on Dr Simon's evidence. Professor Deakin accepted under cross-examination that Mr Ebanks may have lost as much as half his blood volume by then. Dr Taiganides, the senior surgeon on call, told the court he entered the trauma room at about 4:51am. When he did, the defence said, there was no anaesthetist, no blood immediately available and no X-ray machine. He intubated the patient himself, a task his counsel said would normally fall to an anaesthetist. Mr Tonner called it a "worst-case scenario".

Dr Taiganides told the jury the blood did not reach the trauma room until after Mr Ebanks had died. The constable who watched from the doorway said he saw a physician leave the room in apparent anger; under cross-examination it emerged that she had gone to look for the blood. Dr Simon said that because the 911 call came almost an hour before the ambulance reached the hospital, the blood and a portable X-ray should have been waiting. Mr Ebanks was pronounced dead 35 minutes after he reached the emergency room, the jury was told when the Crown opened its case on 8 September.

The Crown's case, through Professor Deakin, was that the tube caused the death, not the wounds or the delay. That was a clinical opinion the jury was entitled to weigh, and it concerned the last link in the chain. The evidence about the earlier links, the hour on the road and the empty trauma bay, was not the subject of any charge and was not tested as one.

How a surgeon came to be charged

The route from the trauma room to the dock began, on Dr Taiganides's evidence, with a report from the forensic pathologist to the police after the post-mortem examination found the tube in the oesophagus. No clinical review by the hospital has been reported as the origin of the allegation.

The pathologist's opinion changed. Mr Tonner told the jury in his closing speech that her original post-mortem report said Mr Ebanks would have died regardless of any intubation error, and that a later report said the misplacement contributed to his death. The RCIPS said on 11 September 2024 that a 61-year-old George Town man had been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter by reason of gross negligence over the 21 January incident and released on police bail. The RCIPS announced on 22 August 2025 that he had been charged. He appeared in the Summary Court on 26 August 2025, 19 months after the death, and pleaded not guilty in the Grand Court before Justice Richards on 26 September 2025, by video link from Greece, where he now lives and to which he had been bailed on a bond. His bail was extended to 5 May 2026, the date the trial was first set to begin, with a case management hearing listed for 5 March 2026 and a defence estimate of three to four weeks for the trial. Professor Deakin had not visited the George Town emergency department and accepted that he had not been told that other clinicians had checked the tube. Dr Simon also worked from the records.

An acquittal does not show that a charge should not have been brought. A prosecutor who receives a pathologist's finding and an independent expert report describing a gross departure from the standard of care has a duty to consider it. Professor Deakin held his opinion under cross-examination, and the judge left the case to the jury. The cost of the prosecution, which instructed a King's Counsel and a principal expert witness who are both based in the United Kingdom for a four-week trial, has not been published.

What the statute and the hospital's own standard require

Cayman's Coroners Act (2021 Revision) requires a Coroner, where there is reasonable cause to suspect a violent or unnatural death, to hold an inquest "as soon as practicable" (section 4), sitting with a jury of twelve (sections 2 and 6). Section 11 requires the Coroner to stay the inquest once the Director of Public Prosecutions brings criminal charges, and section 13 allows it to resume afterwards, provided the Coroner "shall not record a verdict inconsistent with the finding of any criminal court" that has acquitted a person charged in connection with the death. No inquest into Mr Ebanks's death has been reported as opened, stayed or resumed.

The HSA announced in June 2023 that the Authority as a whole, including its satellite locations, had been accredited by Joint Commission International after an onsite review from 1 to 10 May 2023, and that accredited hospitals are inspected every three years to keep the accreditation. The HSA has not said whether it reviewed Mr Ebanks's care. When the charge was announced in August 2025, the HSA said it could not comment on the matter, described Dr Taiganides as "a practitioner who previously worked at the Authority", and said it maintains strict practitioner requirements, including credentialing, independent verification of qualifications, licensing with the Cayman Islands Medical and Dental Council and review by senior medical staff.

The nearest published benchmark in a comparable legal system is the United Kingdom's Williams review into gross negligence manslaughter in healthcare, published by the Department of Health and Social Care on 11 June 2018. It recommended a working group to "set out a clear explanatory statement of the law on gross negligence manslaughter", that expert witnesses "should have relevant clinical experience" and be in current practice in the area under consideration, and that a parallel investigation should "determine the role of systemic and human factors in the incident". The review does not bind Cayman's prosecutors.

One trial, and no charge for the shooting

Two years and nine months after the shooting, no one has been identified in court as the person who fired. Just over two years passed between Dr Taiganides's arrest and his acquittal, of which four weeks were spent on trial.

He had left the HSA by the time he was charged. Outside court on 2 October he told the Cayman Compass that the case would make doctors harder to hire. "It will be very hard to recruit people if they're treated this way," he said, adding that he was "sincerely grateful to the jury". Asked whether he would consider returning to Cayman, he said: "I don't think so."

Whether a review of the response on 21 January 2024 follows the verdict is a decision for the HSA, which operates the hospital and the ambulance service; for the Coroner, under the Act; for the Medical and Dental Council, which licenses practitioners; and for the Director of Public Prosecutions, whose office brought the only charge.