Why is NO ONE to blame over Tate tragedy?
As teen pusher’s history of violence is laid bare...
THE troubled teenager who threw a six-year-old boy from a 100ft-high balcony at the Tate Modern art gallery nearly killed another child months earlier, it was revealed yesterday.
The terrifying attack on the other child is among eight newly-revealed assaults listed in an official report into the Tate attack.
Experts said ‘only luck’ prevented two of the other incidents ending in deaths – yet social workers did not consider Jonty Bravery, 19, a ‘risk to the public’.
The report uncovered multiple warnings about Bravery, but failed to blame anyone for him being free to carry out the Tate attack. It is understood no one has been sacked or disciplined.
Bravery, who has autism and a personality disorder, was jailed for life – and ordered to serve a minimum 15 years – last year after he admitted attempting to murder the French boy at the gallery in central London in August 2019.
The boy survived, but faces a lifetime of disability. Witnesses said he smirked as he hurled him from a viewing gallery before declaring ‘I am mad’ to the child’s hysterical parents.
A Daily Mail investigation found Bravery, who had carers, had warned them a year in advance that he intended to throw someone from a tall building.
They even made a chilling audio recording of him describing his plans.
Now a serious case review has uncovered a shocking list of other warning incidents involving the volatile teenager, who was in the care of a local council but was unsupervised on the day.
The review found that in 2017, when he was 15, he lashed out after losing a game of ten-pin bowling and a classmate was ‘physically harmed...with an injury that could have been life-threatening’.
In a second incident at his school, he bit a pupil, saying he ‘needed to see blood to satisfy his need to harm that
‘No consequences for his actions’
child’. The stocky teenager also hit a climbing wall instructor at a leisure centre, damaged a car and hid a brick and scissors in a bedroom at his residential special school. When teachers called police, he assaulted an officer.
The review said a mental health assessment was ordered as his behaviour became ‘increasingly criminal’, but this was ‘flawed’ because psychiatrists ‘had no direct contact’ with Bravery.
The psychiatrists warned: ‘ Only luck prevented two earlier incidents ending in mortal injury to the victims.’
Bravery grew too troublesome for his parents – at one point he smeared faeces on his mother’s make-up brushes – and at the age of 14 he was sent to a secure psychiatric hospital for six months in 2016. Afterwards, he was placed in the residential school and then a children’s home before being given a flat in Northolt, west London, where he had round-the- clock supervision by care workers.
A risk assessment commissioned by Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services warned of ‘significant risks to care staff, children and the community’. But the review said a string of blunders meant the warnings were ignored and other mistakes were made.
It added that by October 2017 Bravery was bent on ‘callous and malicious’ acts of violence towards care staff, including dragging a woman along the floor by her hair.
However, experts concluded it was not in Bravery’s ‘ interests’ to return to a secure hospital, leaving Hammersmith and Fulham Council ‘no option’ but to continue caring for him in the community. But the teenager caused havoc with neighbours and ‘seemed to gain pleasure... and excitement from the harm and chaos he created’.
In August 2018, Bravery lured police to his flat so he could assault one of them in protest at his care arrangements.
Charged with assault, he told his solicitor he had thoughts of killing somebody. However, the prosecution was dropped, reinforcing Bravery’s sense there were no consequences for his actions. The serious case review said people thought he was just ‘attention seeking’. In April 2019, Bravery punched a Burger King worker in the face and urinated in a police cell.
Yesterday’s report by the Local Safeguarding Children Partnership said Bravery had appeared to be improving in the summer of 2019, adding: ‘There was no recent evidence that he presented a risk to other children or adults.
‘It was in this context that he was progressively given more freedoms, which saw him able to visit central London unaccompanied on the day of the incident.’
The review blamed a ‘lack of residential treatment options’ for young people with conditions like Bravery’s and said professionals tried to help him but 60 institutions turned him away. Bravery’s parents both gave evidence to the inquiry. His father Piers expressed frustration at the system for helping autistic youngsters.
Last night Hammersmith and Fulham Council welcomed the review. A spokesman said: ‘We extend our continuing and sincere sympathies to the young child and his family. The review provides considerable lessons to be learned by the many agencies involved and nationally by ministers.
‘For our part, we will continue to strive for real change in the provision for autistic children with challenging behaviours. We are now calling on the Government to deliver on the key finding of the lack of suitable therapeutic residential care for young people like [Bravery] with complex needs. This report can and must be a sea change.’
HOW many times have we heard the same story. A violent and mentally unstable offender commits a ghastly crime while under supervision of social services. Then an inquiry finds no one was to blame.
So it was again in the case of Jonty Bravery, who threw a six-year-old boy off a 100ft balcony at the Tate Modern. Bravery, 19, had previously waged a campaign of ‘callous and malicious acts of violence’ against children and his carers.
No fewer than eight earlier attacks were listed in an official report, including almost killing another schoolchild. Yet unbelievably, social workers maintained he was not ‘a risk to the public’.
So will lessons be learned this time? If experience is any yardstick, the prospects are not good.