Man detained indefinitely for killing mobility scooter rider, 87
A CAREER criminal who stabbed an elderly busker to death on his mobility scooter five days after leaving prison has been given an indefinite hospital order.
Lee Byer, who has 15 convictions for 30 crimes, knifed grandfather Thomas O’Halloran, 87, in the neck and chest in a West London underpass in a ‘senseless killing’.
Judge Mark Lucraft said the killer would need life-long treatment for paranoid schizophrenia and it is likely he would be in Broadmoor secure hospital for the rest of his life.
But the decision, which echoes that made by Mr Justice Turner when he sentenced Nottingham killer Valdo Calocane to the same fate rather than a prison term, is likely to disappoint Mr O’Halloran’s family. His niece, Sharon Brennan, said before the hearing: ‘They were saying he was going to plead insanity and all this crap. It is a cop out. They all say they are mad. He obviously knew what he was doing and there is nothing mad about him.’
The victim’s grieving brother George said last night: ‘There is nothing we can do about it now. If that is the judgement, that’s the judgement.’
Judge Lucraft said he knew the pensioner’s family would find his decision difficult to understand, but said the case had been considered ‘by two of the country’s leading forensic psychiatrists’.
Byer, 45, was prescribed antipsychotic medication after hearing voices in autumn 2020 while serving a 12-year sentence for robbery. But it was stopped in 2021, a year before his release from Wormwood Scrubs prison.
He killed Mr O’Halloran in Greenford in August 2022. The retired maintenance engineer had been raising money for Ukrainian charities when he was stabbed twice in the heart, once in the back and three times in the neck.
He bled to death by the side of a road after telling a bystander he had been attacked.
Last month, Byer denied murder but pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter by diminished responsibility and having an offensive weapon. The pleas were accepted by the prosecution after mental health reports found Byer was psychotic, hearing voices, suffering from paranoid delusions and paranoid schizophrenia.