David Reid of Factory Records’ X-O-Dus dies behind bars, serving time for rape and sexual abuse

David Reid of the Manchester reggae band X-O-Dus has died in prison while serving time for rape and sexual abuse.

It has been revealed by an inquest that guitarist Reid died in January 2021 of heart failure brough about by a heart disease (via Manchester Evening News), after he had been jailed in 2013 for a series of historic sexual offences, including rape and indecent assault against one victim.

He was serving a sentence of 16 years in HMP Rye Hill, a category B training prison in Warwickshire, with Sue McAllister, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, finding that the healthcare he had received was “not equivalent to that which he could have expected to receive in the community”.

The government representative, who investigates every death in custody, noted that Reid had been subject to a “delay” in finding a cell, although she could not say whether that had “affected the outcome for him”.

Reid pleaded guilty to four charges of indecent assault against a girl, but denied four counts of rape against the same victim. He was found guilty at Manchester Crown Court, who ruled that he had repeatedly raped and abused a girl in the city’s Moss Side area over a three-year period in the early 1980s.

He is reported to have suffered with high blood pressure and paranoid schizophrenia, with McAllister finding that changes in his medication “appeared to have contributed to poor control of his blood pressure”.

“The clinical reviewer also found that prisoners with long-term conditions were not monitored sufficiently because of a lack of trained specialist nurses, there was no recall system in place to monitor prisoners with long-term conditions, and there was a lack of continuity of care because Mr Reid was seen by a number of different GPs.”

The group released their best-known single ‘English Black Boys’ in 1980 on Tony Wilson‘s Factory Records, becoming the only reggae band to feature on the iconic independent label.

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