The mother of one of the students stabbed to death in Nottingham has called for an inquiry into any failings that led to the knife attacks.
Emma Webber told the Times that her family “fully support” calls for a public inquiry, which also has the backing of the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, into the killings of her son Barnaby Webber, fellow University of Nottingham student Grace O’Malley-Kumar and the 65-year-old school caretaker Ian Coates.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Webber describes the “fury” she feels over what they have described as a lenient sentence given to Valdo Calocane for the killings last year.
Calocane’s guilty pleas to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility were accepted this week, resulting in a judge handing down a restricted hospital order to the 32-year-old.
Calocane has paranoid schizophrenia and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act four times before the killings.
At the time of the attacks, a warrant for his arrest was outstanding after he had failed to appear in court nine months earlier for the alleged assault of a police officer while he was being sectioned.
Calocane, who studied mechanical engineering at the University of Nottingham, stabbed O’Malley-Kumar and Webber in the early hours of 13 June last year when they were walking home from a night out.
He went on to stab Coates, who was driving to work, before stealing his van and driving it into pedestrians in the city centre. Wayne Birkett, Marcin Gawronski and Sharon Miller sustained serious injuries but survived.
Emma Webber and the families of O’Malley-Kumar and Coates have accused prosecutors of a fait accompli in accepting a manslaughter charge rather than pursuing a murder verdict.
Webber described how the Crown Prosecution Service showed the family stills of CCTV footage to justify the decision.
Webber told the Daily Mail: “What took my breath away was that he went into the shadows and stayed there for 10 minutes. This wasn’t a crazed person who was raging, whose eyes were rolling. This was someone who planned his route and hid before attacking my precious son.”
A spokesperson for the attorney general has confirmed that the office has received a referral arguing the sentence was unduly lenient. The cabinet minister has 28 days from sentencing to review the request and decide whether to refer the case to the court of appeal to determine whether the sentence was appropriate.
Webber told the Mail that she and the other victims’ families would fight not only to keep their memories alive, but “to change what is going wrong in this country with our mental health care and in our policing and judicial system”.
“It won’t bring Barney back, so the sadness and grief will remain, but he will have justice,” Webber added.
