SON’S DEATH ‘HAS SIMILARITIES’ TO NOTTINGHAM KILLINGS – MUM

THE mother of a young man knifed to death on a night out by a mentally ill knifeman has said her son’s case has “many similarities” to the triple Nottingham killings.

Joanne Billington, whose son Jacob, 23, was killed by paranoid schizophrenic Zephaniah McLeod during a 90-minute knife rampage in which he randomly attacked eight people on September 6, 2020, said there is a wider issue around managing severely mentally ill individuals.

Speaking to the media after the inquest into her son’s death concluded yesterday, Mrs Billington said there appeared to be similarities between her son’s killing and the Nottingham stabbings on June 13 last year.

Mrs Billington said lessons from a serious case review in the aftermath of her son’s death “do not seem to have been put in place or made any changes at all” to the way agencies, including mental health teams, work together to manage violent and severely mentally ill individuals.

She said: “There’s also a wider issue around the management of severely mentally ill individuals who are violent and pose a risk to the public.

“Agencies need to be staffed, managed and monitored adequately in cases like ours, and other recent cases. If not, this will continue to wreck innocent people’s lives.”

She added: “We don’t yet know if that was a factor in the Nottingham case, but it probably may have been. So at the moment, without that knowledge, we don’t know how similar the cases are, but it certainly does seem to have a lot of similarities.

“It is why I was so pleased to get an inquest, because it does highlight the failings that seem to be systematic and it can be carried forward to hopefully prevent any future deaths.”

Mrs Billington, from Merseyside, said her son’s death was “every parent’s worst nightmare” and they were then “plunged into a world of court cases and barristers and serious case reviews”.

She said: “My son Jacob was a fantastic young man who lost his life in horrific circumstances, at the hands of an extremely mentally ill individual who had stabbed seven other innocent people on that night. 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.

“He was released from prison with no supervision at the end of his sentence, and there was no effective release planning for this dangerous individual. And the risk to the public was never seriously considered.”