Doctors escape punishment over failures to halt boy’s killer
A GRIEVING mother last night said she was ‘appalled’ after two doctors who allowed her 12-yearold son’s schizophrenic killer to roam the streets escaped disciplinary action.
Jo Wood lambasted the General Medical Council (GMC) for dropping cases against psychiatrists Dr Adnan Khan and Dr Manesh Rajendraprasad – despite being criticised by a damning inquest over their failure to detain Terence Glover in a secure hospital.
Glover deliberately ploughed his car into a group of pupils outside a secondary school in Loughton, Essex, in December 2019, killing Ms Wood’s son, Harley Watson, and injuring nine other children.
The killer had been known to mental health services since 2012 after he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was arrested for threatening a neighbour with a knife.
An investigation by The Mail on
Sunday in 2021 revealed how the NHS failed to detain Glover under the Mental Health Act on five separate occasions.
Glover was arrested in September 2019 after making a string of abusive 999 calls, but was then released from police custody after Dr Khan, Dr Rajendraprasad and a social worker from Essex County Council carried out a mental health assessment that lasted less than three minutes.
The doctors made their decision after failing to obtain a crucial report from a psychiatric nurse who hours earlier had discovered Glover had been ‘talking about running children over’.
The GMC launched an investigation into both, but the MoS can reveal it has decided to take no further action against either of them. It ruled Dr Khan’s failures in accessing the nurse’s notes and arranging a follow-up appointment with Glover were ‘at the lower end of the seriousness spectrum’.
Similarly, mistakes made by Dr Rajendraprasad ‘were not serious enough to warrant action’.
‘I was appalled,’ Ms Wood, 36, said last night. ‘I shouldn’t be so surprised – it’s another agency failing to do its job. I naively thought the GMC would be different and take into account that an innocent child lost his life.’
Julian Hendy, of bereavement charity Hundred Families, said: ‘This is a shocking and deeply concerning investigation by the GMC. How can they claim the doctors’ failings are not serious when a child has died?’
The GMC said: ‘Harley’s death was a tragedy, and our thoughts and condolences are with his family.’
Dr Khan and Dr Rajendraprasad did not reply to requests to comment.
Glover was jailed indefinitely under the Mental Health Act in January 2021 after pleading guilty to manslaughter by diminished responsibility and the attempted murder of a 23-year-old and nine children.