Two police forces have apologised to bereaved families and survivors of the Nottingham attacks for failing to act on an arrest warrant for Valdo Calocane that was issued 10 months before he killed three people, a public inquiry has heard.
NHS England and the NHS trust that cared for Calocane, who has paranoid schizophrenia, also apologised to the families over missed opportunities. “The NHS and the system as a whole failed you with devastating consequences,” the lawyer representing NHS England said.
Representatives of the bereaved families, survivors and various agencies, including police, the NHS and the University of Nottingham, provided statements on the second day of hearings at the public inquiry, which is examining the “events, acts and omissions” that allowed Calocane to be free to kill.
The inquiry previously heard how an arrest warrant was issued for Calocane in September 2022 after he failed to attend a hearing at Nottingham magistrates court, where he was accused of assaulting an emergency worker.
Despite this, Calocane was able to assault two colleagues at a factory in Kegworth, Leicestershire, in 2023. A month later, on 13 June 2023, he killed two University of Nottingham students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and a caretaker, Ian Coates, 65, and seriously injured three other people.
John Beggs KC, representing Nottinghamshire police, said the force accepted it should have executed the arrest warrant in a “timely manner”, and the decision not to do so was described by the temporary deputy chief constable, Rob Griffin, as a “serious failure”.
“He recognised the seriousness of what happened, or rather, what didn’t happen, and the distress it caused,” Beggs said. “He offered and we repeated an unreserved apology to the families of the deceased and the survivors.”
Beggs said police understood “why the bereaved and survivors are concerned by the failure to execute the warrant” but argued it was not “realistic” to suggest Calocane would have been convicted or imprisoned given his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.
Earlier, the lawyer for the bereaved families, Tim Maloney KC, said any attempt by police to say that arresting Calocane would have made no difference would be “cowardly, highly offensive and insulting”.
“If the police do say that executing a warrant for his arrest would have made no difference, then the people of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire have a lot to worry about in relation to who is keeping them safe,” he said.
Hugh Davies KC, representing three officers from Leicestershire police, also apologised for the “recognised operational failures”.
These included the fact officers did not view records of Calocane’s previous interactions with police when they went to the Kegworth factory after his assault there.
If the officer had accessed Calocane’s record “she would have been able to discover that VC [Valdo Calocane] had an outstanding warrant for his arrest”, Davies said.
The inquiry also heard from Adam Straw KC, representing Calocane’s mother and brother, who said there were “glaring signs” a year before the attacks that Calocane was relapsing in his schizophrenia, including that he had stopped taking his antipsychotic medication.
Straw said the decision by healthcare officials to discharge Calocane in late 2022 was “disastrous”, and his family was not given a “full picture” of his mental health illness or the violent attacks he committed until after the killings in Nottingham the following summer.
If Calocane’s mother had “known the full picture, the full risk, she would have been much more vigilant for signs of risk”, Straw said.
Maloney, for the families, said the Nottingham attacks represented the “culmination of decades of unconscionable but entirely predictable structural and systemic individual failures” and the families “live with the horror of that day, today and every day.”
Sophie Cartwright KC, representing the three survivors of the attack, said Wayne Birkett and Sharon Miller had suffered “appalling and life-changing injuries” and Birkett had repeatedly said he wished his life had been taken instead of those who were killed.
The inquiry continues.
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