How our sclerotic state failed Valdo Calocane’s victims

Multiple fatalities. Multiple locations. Three killed by stabbing, three more rammed by a van. When details began to emerge about the Nottingham attack on 13 June 2023, it had all the hallmarks of a terrorist atrocity.

Of course the fact that the killer, mature student Valdo Calocane, turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic, rather than an Islamist terrorist, was of zero comfort to a community terrorised and three families forever bereft.

Calocane stabbed 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar to death on their way home from a night out. Shortly after, he killed Ian Coates – who was on his way to work as a school caretaker, a few months from retirement. He then stole Coates’s van and ploughed it into people at a bus stop.

Still, while Calocane may have lacked any grand ideological motive, this blood-curdling story had another thing in common with the many Islamist attacks that we have endured over recent years. Namely, those four, chilling words: ‘known to the authorities’.

Calocane wasn’t on some MI5 watchlist – incidentally, he was convinced the security services were trying to control him – but he had been in the Nottinghamshire mental-health system for more than three years, and chance after chance was missed to stop and treat him before he could act on his violent, paranoid delusions.

This week, a new report by the Care Quality Commission alongside an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama series have laid bare the myriad, inexcusable failings of the Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. And indeed of the police.

This dreadful story begins on 24 May 2020, when Calocane was arrested in Nottingham for the first time. He had burst into his neighbour’s flat, told by the voices in his head that his mother was being raped inside.

He wasn’t charged. He was assessed, diagnosed with ‘first-episode psychosis’, and sent home with medication. His mother, who lives in Wales, was called. But by the time she had driven to Nottingham, Calocane had been arrested again. An hour after his release, he had barged into another flat. A terrified woman inside threw herself out of a window, fracturing her lower spine.

So began a series of inexplicable decisions, born of systemic incompetence and credulity. He refused to take his medication. He remained violent. He later admitted to doctors that he had lied about taking his meds. He was sectioned four times. And yet he remained for those three years under the not-so-watchful eye of community care, punctuated by relatively short stints in hospital.

Doctors had long feared he might be capable of murder. Red flags were raised, but weren’t heeded. After Calocane was sectioned for the second time, in July 2020, after barging into yet another flat, a psychiatrist wrote this grimly prescient note: ‘[T]here seems to be no insight or remorse and the danger is that this will happen again and perhaps Valdo will end up killing someone.’

Calocane was discharged from hospital two weeks later, now diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Speaking to the BBC, forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard Taylor said he has never seen a case handled like this before. ‘If a psychiatrist is committing themselves to a serious risk of homicide, then I think that’s something I would expect to be taken very seriously’, he told Panorama.

By the time Calocane – still refusing to take his meds, refusing to believe he was ill and convinced of a state conspiracy to get him – stepped out with a knife that June morning, he had been off the mental-health team’s radar for months. He was offloaded on to his GP in September 2022, due to his lack of engagement.

The same day the decision to discharge Calocane was made, a warrant was put out for his arrest. He had failed to turn up to court, over an earlier assault on a police officer. The warrant was still active, nine months later, when he killed Webber, O’Malley-Kumar and Coates in cold blood. The police had never carried it out.

Experts are baffled as to how this could all happen. NHS mental-health services are hardly the ‘envy of the world’, even less so than the NHS more broadly. Mental-health beds are scarce and shrinking in number. Still, putting questions of funding and process aside, this seems like the definition of an avoidable tragedy. Sir Simon Wessely, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, told the BBC’s Today programme this morning that adequate powers were in place to deal with Calocane. They just weren’t used.

Some say the problem is as much cultural as it is about a lack of funding. Julian Hendy, director of Hundred Families, a charity which supports families affected by ‘mental-health homicides’, points to a collective ‘lack of assertive outreach’ on the part of some NHS services. ‘There is also an optimism bias’, he tells the Telegraph. ‘Even if someone has a history of violence – as Calocane did – there will be an assumption that he will not reoffend if he is on his medicine.’ As we now know, that’s a terribly big if.

While most mentally ill people aren’t violent, dangerous individuals, flitting between the health service and the criminal-justice system, are falling through the cracks.

In September 2020, Zephaniah McLeod, another paranoid schizophrenic, went on a stabbing spree in Birmingham, killing one man and injuring seven others. He had not been properly medicated for years and had just been released from prison without supervision – mental-health services had no idea where he had gone. A multi-agency review pointed to a litany of failings.

The Nottingham hospital that was responsible for Calocane’s care had a near-identical scandal 15 years ago, when paranoid schizophrenic William Barnard killed his grandfather, following many missed opportunities to hospitalise him and ensure he was properly treated. An investigation found that Barnard had been given ‘misguided care’. Deadly mistakes, now repeated.

‘People can’t put their children into holiday clubs without worrying, you can’t put your child on a school bus without worrying, you can’t walk through Leicester Square in broad daylight’, said Emma Webber, mother of Barnaby, speaking to GB News yesterday. She was connecting the Nottingham horror with some more recent acts of senseless barbarism on our streets.

While the investigations into the killings at the Southport Taylor Swift holiday club and the stabbing of a young girl in Leicester Square this week are only really beginning, there is no shortage of examples in which the sclerotic British state has ‘missed opportunities’ – to use that bloodless phrase – to stop dangerous people from snuffing out innocent lives. From the Manchester Arena bomber, who slipped through MI5’s fingers, to the Clapham acid-attacker, who was granted asylum even after he had been convicted of two sex offences, the authorities are failing to keep the public safe, even when furnished with all the power and intel necessary to act.

At trial, Calocane pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility. It was a move bitterly opposed by the victims’ families, who say he was more in control of himself and his actions than his defence team had let on. He was given an indefinite hospital order and will likely live out his days in a secure facility.

Earlier this year, Court of Appeal judges affirmed that a high-security hospital, rather than a prison, is the right place for Calocane. I’ve no reason to doubt them. He is clearly a deeply disturbed, profoundly mentally ill man – a point the victims’ families have never questioned. But you can understand why the people whose lives he has ripped apart took this as one final insult. As another state failure in a very, very long line of them.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_