Missed opportunities to stop Nottingham triple-killer

A mother of a 19-year-old student, killed alongside two others during a knife rampage in Nottingham last June, has accused the Nottinghamshire police of having “blood on [its] hands”.

Emma Webber, the mother of Barnaby Webber, accused the force of failure for not arresting triple-killer Valdo Calocane months earlier, as the 32-year-old was sentenced to indefinite detention in a high-security hospital at Nottingham crown court today. “We as a devastated family have been let down by multiple agency failings and ineffectiveness.” 

Aspiring medic Grace O’Malley-Kumar and history student Barnaby Webber were returning home from a night out celebrating their end of exams last summer when Calocane repeatedly – and fatally – stabbed them just 200 metres from their student accommodation. 

He then made his way to Magdala Road, where he attacked 65-year-old school caretaker, Ian Coates. Calocane repeatedly stabbed Coates before stealing his Vauxhall van and leaving him to die in the street. He used the van to mow down three pedestrians, who all survived the attack, before being tasered and arrested by the police. 

Calocane is an engineering graduate from Nottingham University. Born in Guinea-Bissau in 1991, he left at the age of three, lived in Madeira and Lisbon before coming to Britain with his family in 2007 at the age of 16. 

Unusually, despite the brutality of these killings, Calocane has not been charged with murder. The prosecution has accepted his manslaughter plea on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to him suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

While the judge said he would “very probably” be detained for the rest of his life, Janine McKinney, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said the expert medical evidence that Calocane was substantially impaired by psychosis, caused by his paranoid schizophrenia, was “overwhelming”. 

What is troubling – and yet all too familiar – about this tragic case is the substantial evidence of missed opportunities to prevent these fatal attacks. 

Calocane had a history of severe mental health illness, starting in 2019, according to his defence barrister Peter Joyce KC. He had been prescribed anti-psychotic medication but stopped taking it and Calocane’s family became increasingly concerned about his mental condition in May 2021. According to his brother, he had been hearing voices, telling him his family members would die. Calocane even travelled to the MI5 headquarters in May 2021 to tell them to stop controlling him.

Not only was he suffering from severe mental illness, countless evidence indicated too that his illness made him a danger to those around him. 

Nottinghamshire Police said it had “previously engaged” with Calocane “on a number of occasions between 2020 and 2022”.

Nottingham Crown Court heard Calocane had been sectioned four times in the three years leading up to the killings, including an incident during lockdown in which he followed a woman home and left her so terrified she leapt from a window to escape.

It was revealed this week that a warrant for Calocane’s arrest was outstanding at the time of the attacks, after he had failed to appear in court nine months earlier for an alleged assault of a police officer while he was being sectioned.

The court heard he had been evicted from accommodation in the Lenton area of the city as a result of assaulting his flatmates. And, just over a month before the fatal attacks, he allegedly assaulted two colleagues at a warehouse, four days after he started working there.

Rob Griffin, assistant chief constable, has “personally reviewed this matter” and concluded the force “should have done more to arrest him”.

Dr Sanjoy Kumar, the father of Grace O’Malley-Kumar, said today that he has never questioned Calocane’s mental diagnosis. But, he added, the “missed opportunities to divert his lethal calls will forever play on our minds”.

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