‘Failure upon failure’ before knife rampage
THE devastated families of victims of the Nottingham knife rampage made fresh calls for a public inquiry into the atrocity yesterday.
It came as the Appeal Court was told paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane should have had a “hybrid” jail term alongside his hospital order.
Furious relatives of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates say “failure upon failure upon failure” contributed to their loved ones being killed.
Lawyers acting for Attorney General Victoria Prentis called Calocane’s sentence “unduly lenient”. They say it should sit alongside a life sentence, meaning he would be treated in hospital before serving the rest of the term behind bars.
Calocane, 32, was said to be suffering a “severe psychotic episode” when he stabbed Nottingham University undergraduates Grace and Barnaby, both 19, to death as they walked home from a nightclub in the early hours of June 13 last year.
He then killed school caretaker Ian, 65, before stealing his van and trying to mow down three people.
But the families were left shellshocked on the eve of January’s hearing at Nottingham Crown Court when murder charges were downgraded to manslaughter by diminished responsibility.The subsequent indefinite hospital order sentence handed to Calocane left the door open for his release when deemed fit. Yesterday, Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr said a decision on the appeal would be given “within seven days or so”. Speaking at the Royal Courts of Justice, Grace’s father Dr Sanjoy Kumar said the families were failed by police, NHS trusts and a council, adding: “How many more people do we need to add to the list of failures?
“That is why what we are saying is that to join all of these investigations together, we would robustly ask for a public inquiry for the benefit of every family in England who send their children away to university.”
Emma Webber, mother of Barnaby, added: “Next week we will finally get some sort of answer but it is not closure, it is not a full stop. It’s just an ongoing part of the fight we’re in.”