The Webber and O’Malley-Kumar families had never met before 13 June last year. When they did, it was in the midst of unimaginable tragedy.
Surrounded by shocked students and with TV cameras trained on their expressions, the parents of Barnaby and Grace sobbed as they hugged one another at the vigil held for their children. A day earlier, while walking home from a night out, the 19-year-old students had been stabbed to death by Valdo Calocane.
“The two of them fell together and I think that’s driven us as families closer together,” said David Webber, Barnaby’s dad. “We’re both in exactly the same place with this – it’s a vortex of hell, it just doesn’t stop.”
Sanjoy Kumar, Grace’s father, said the support of the Webber family, as well the family of Ian Coates, Calocane’s third victim that night, had been the one positive thing to emerge from the tragedy.
“I ring David sometimes just out of the blue and cry down the phone,” he said. “I don’t have to tell him what’s happened because we have this in common; he totally understands what I’m going through. I think our wives do, too.
“It’s the one little green shoot that’s come out all of this, having the support of the other families. I don’t know how we would have done it alone.”
In the words of James Coates, one of Ian’s sons, the families are “all part of an anniversary they never want to celebrate”.
The three families have now joined forces to battle for change and justice on behalf of Grace, Barnaby and Ian, and the three people who suffered serious injuries when they were ran over by Calocane during his rampage through the city.
They are still reeling from a sentencing hearing in January where Calocane was handed a hospital order after pleading guilty to manslaughter and attempted murder, while evidence has continued to emerge about the missed opportunities to stop him before the attacks.
Instead of being able to focus on grieving for their children, Kumar and Webber are spending much of their time putting together timelines of events, poring over evidence, lobbying politicians and doing media interviews.
“We seem to have been pulled back into this hell all over again. We shouldn’t be sat here having to drag all these emotions up, it’s hard enough as it is,” said Webber. “And we’re fighting against people we shouldn’t be fighting against – the police and the CPS.”
Kumar said the families were increasingly angry they were “having to piece things together ourselves” in their quest to find out how Calocane evaded authorities for so long.
“Because we want people to answer as to why this happened. From the beginning, right to the tragedy at the end. Why are the mental health services putting dangerous people back on the street? Then, if those people are committing crimes, why are the police not investigating properly?” he said.
In his career as a doctor, Kumar has seen many distressing things, but what happened to his daughter, a medical student and hockey player, keeps him awake at night.
“I have nightmares about her injuries every night. I wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats because I wasn’t there. A sheer sense of guilt,” he said. “I’ve gone from being a strong bloke to emotionally incontinent – every time I walk past her empty room, see the stethoscope on her bed.”
Although he hasn’t watched the CCTV footage of her death while trying to defend Barnaby, he was given a verbal description of the clip from someone watching. “I wanted to put myself through that because I didn’t want to die with not knowing. I thought, I’m going to ask myself these questions every other day otherwise,” he said.
His medical background and work as a police surgeon has armed him with knowledge about police and medical procedure, and he thinks there were major failures in both that led to Calocane being able to carry out the killings.
“We have to have a public inquiry – these individual investigations that have been set up will not change legislation, and they will not change the status quo,” he said.
One of the families’ main demands is for a law making psychiatrists – those designated as responsible medical officers – legally accountable for patients they discharge in to the community. “If doctors knew they would be going to prison because one of their patients killed someone, we would see a change immediately,” he said.
“I want doctors to think: would they discharge someone if they knew the next person that patient met was going to be their son or their daughter? I want them to use that as their yardstick.”
But the families’ frustrations also lie at the door of Nottinghamshire police, who they believe could have stopped Calocane before the killings. There had been a warrant out for his arrest for nine months at the time of the attacks, but officers had failed to locate him.
It has also emerged that, prior to this, he came into contact with police on numerous occasions for violent incidents including breaking down flat doors, putting a flatmate in a headlock and scaring a woman so badly she jumped out a first floor window to evade him – but Calocane never faced criminal charges.
“We have so many unanswered questions,” said Webber. “If these organisations had done their jobs properly, it would almost be impossible for our kids to be killed. Because they would have caught him. The warning signs people had was horrendous. This guy had a massive history of violence, they just did nothing about it.”
The families said they did not dispute Calocane’s diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, which experts said led him to kill. But they do question whether there is enough evidence to prove he was psychotic on the day of the attacks.
They said some of his actions in the hours leading up to the stabbings remain unexplained – he took cash out of an ATM, which disappeared, along with a large bag, during a two-hour period when he was out of sight of CCTV.
They have strong suspicions he may have taken drugs, which haven’t been assuaged by Calocane’s refusal to provide samples after his arrest. Police said they didn’t take hair samples, which they can do without cooperation, because there was no evidence to suggest he had taken drugs.
“The incompetence of not doing that with someone who’s killed three people is ridiculous,” said Kumar. “I’m still going to maintain until the day I die, this guy knew what he was doing on the day. He hid in the shrubbery and waited for our children. He picked on vulnerable people.”
Calocane’s sentence is being reviewed for potentially being unduly lenient and the families are hoping for something that will mean Calocane is sent to prison if he is ever deemed safe enough to discharge from hospital.
In the meantime, they are trying to cope with the pain of losing their children. “It kills me every day to know he’s not here,” said David. “Every time I drive home there’s this moment before I turn around the corner where I think: will I see his silver polo parked outside my house? Then I know that I’ll never see it.”
His son was an avid cricket player, and the Barnaby Webber Foundation has been set up to help fund grassroots cricket clubs across the country and support children from underprivileged backgrounds.
Similarly, the Grace O’Malley-Kumar Foundation, led by her 17-year-old brother, James, will fund hockey clubs and help introduce “Grace groups” into schools and universities – where pupils are placed in groups of three or four to look out for each other throughout an academic year.
The practice is reportedly already being introduced at sports clubs at Nottingham University, where their parents says Grace and Barnaby had “the best year of their lives”.
“I feel really sorry for Nottingham in all this because it’s a brilliant student city,” said Kumar. “I still recommend the university to people I meet.
“I think the people of Nottingham, like the Coates family, are lovely and the people deserve justice as much as us. We want Nottingham to be a place where you can go to a club and walk home at four in the morning. Everyone should be able to do that. It’s part of the joy of life.”
A spokesperson for Nottinghamshire police said: “The families have raised a number of concerns and the appropriate way for these to be resolved is through the ongoing independent investigation by the IOPC as well as the review by the College of Policing.
“Commenting further could prejudice these investigations. We have written to the families of all of those affected by this horrific crime and offered to meet them.”
