Litany of failure left mentally ill ex-con free to kill graduate
AUNIVERSITY worker was unlawfully killed on a night out in Birmingham by a paranoid schizophrenic who was released from prison months earlier “without any support in place for his serious mental illness”, a coroner has ruled.
There were “lost opportunities” to effectively manage Zephaniah McLeod’s condition, senior coroner for Birmingham and Solihull Louise Hunt said.
Sheffield Hallam University graduate worker Jacob Billington, 23, was killed and his lifelong friend Michael Callaghan was seriously injured when the mentally ill knifeman went on a 90-minute rampage through Birmingham city centre in the early hours of September 6, 2020, in which he also wounded six other people.
McLeod, who was 27 at the time of the attacks and lived in Nately Grove in Selly Oak, was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 21 years at Birmingham Crown Court in 2021, after admitting the manslaughter of Mr Billington, from Crosby, Merseyside, and four counts of attempted murder along with three charges of wounding.
A two-week inquest into the death of Mr Billington heard that McLeod, who had a long history of offending, had been known to mental health services since he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2012, but did not regularly engage with them or take his prescribed medication inside or outside of prison.
Despite being deemed a high risk of serious harm to other people, McLeod was released from HMP Parc in South Wales on April 22, 2020 after a three-year prison sentence for drug and firearm offences – five months before he killed Mr Billington – without any support in place for his mental health, and was released back to Birmingham with no fixed address.
Concluding the inquest on Friday,
senior coroner for Birmingham and Solihull Louise Hunt said that by the time Birmingham and Solihull community mental health teams had identified an address where McLeod had been released to in June 2020, he had already moved somewhere else and no further attempts to find him were made until he attended a new GP surgery on August 10, 2020 asking to be prescribed anti-psychotic medication.
She said: “The failure to adequately
manage his release to Birmingham and the failure to ensure the community mental health team were notified of his release resulted in a lost opportunity to assertively manage his serious mental health condition and this possibly contributed to his mental health state on September 6, 2020.
“Whilst it cannot be said that he probably would have then complied with treatment offered for his significant mental health needs, there is a realistic possibility that he would have done so.”
Jacob’s mother said her son’s case has “many similarities” to the triple Nottingham killings. Joanne Billington said there was a wider issue around managing severely mentally ill individuals, adding there appeared to be similarities between her son’s killing and the Nottingham stabbings on June 13 last year.
Mrs Billington said: “This is every parent’s nightmare, and it became our reality.
“Throughout the sentencing and serious-case review, we discovered that the offender was well-known to all the agencies we would expect to keep the public safe.
“He never complied with anything the services offered, and refused to take his medication.
“We also found out that McLeod had been subjected to enhanced public protection arrangements, but was removed from this six months before release simply because he did not comply with the process. “This was a catastrophic decision which meant many effective measures for monitoring McLeod were taken away. This dangerous man with a severe and enduring mental illness, whose risks to the public were well-documented, simply walked out of prison and disappeared.”
She added: “Ultimately, the bottom of this, you’ve lost your child. You can’t start grieving until this process is done, but in some respects, it has kept me going. And I do feel that we needed to keep going with this to get to this point.”
Whilst it cannot be said that he probably would have complied with treatment offered, there is a realistic possibility he would have done so Coroner