The families of the victims of the Nottingham attacks have vowed to take their fight for accountability “to the next level” on the one-year anniversary of the killings.
In a joint statement, the families of Grace O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates, who were killed by Valdo Calocane in the early hours of 13 June last year, said they had instructed a legal team to help them “leave no stone unturned on our quest for answers”.
They said: “Today we will take time and pause to reflect upon that tragic day and remember the souls of the three vibrant, caring, hardworking and much-loved family members who are no longer here.
“Today is not the day for fight. But tomorrow is. We continue in our relentless pursuit for appropriate justice, individual and organisational accountability.
“As three families we stand united by grief and loss, but fuelled by our anger at the scale of failings, poor policing, weak prosecution, dereliction of duty in medical care and a series of catastrophic missed opportunities that would, and should have stopped these entirely preventable deaths.”
Calocane was given a hospital order after pleading guilty to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility owing to paranoid schizophrenia, as well as three counts of attempted murder.
In May, the court of appeal rejected an application to increase his sentence to include jail time, with the lady chief justice, Sue Carr, saying “schizophrenia was the sole identified cause of these crimes”.
The families said the outcome “was disappointing but not unexpected”, and blamed it on an “utterly flawed and under-resourced criminal justice system”.
They said it was “because of a weak investigation and prosecution, over-reliance upon doctors’ evidence and archaic out-of-date laws that Calocane receives no punishment for his heinous acts.
“We recognise his previous diagnosis of mental illness, however, maintain that he knew what he was doing, he knew it was wrong, but he did it anyway. And therefore, he is a murderer,” they said.
The families said they have briefed Neil Hudgell of Hudgell solicitors and Tim Moloney KC, of Doughty Street Chambers, and their legal teams, as they continue their fight.
They said they wanted to “ensure the failures of Leicester police, Nottingham police and Nottingham Healthcare NHS foundation trust (among others) are exposed and accounted for”.
Hudgell said: “It is our responsibility to ensure that we do everything we can to help these families establish the truth, effect change and find redress, putting all those agencies who played a part in these tragic events under the most powerful of spotlights.”
Calocane fatally stabbed Webber and O’Malley-Kumar, both 19-year-old university students, as they walked home from a night out in the early hours of 13 June last year, before killing Coates, a 65-year-old school caretaker, as he was driving to work.
He used Coates’s van to drive into three pedestrians, Wayne Birkett, Marcin Gawronski and Sharon Miller, who were all seriously injured, before he was arrested by police.
