Woman angry at NHS after son killed her father

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Ms Barnard said that mistakes made in mental health care are to blame for her father’s death, not her son.

She said William was told he did not need to keep taking medication he had been prescribed for paranoid schizophrenia if he did not want to.

“That’s not the right attitude,” she said. “Because then nine months later my dad lost his life.”

Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust apologised for its failings at the time.

Reflecting on the recent CQC report, Ms Barnard said “it’s the same again really to what happened to us” adding that there were “failings and missed opportunities again”.

“It makes you angry. And it is scary because you just don’t know who is walking about who should be under some care.”

Calocane was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020 and was sectioned four times in less than two years.

In June 2023, he killed university students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both aged 19, with a knife as they returned from a night out in Nottingham, before stabbing to death Ian Coates, 65, near the school where he worked as a caretaker.

On Monday, the BBC revealed a doctor had warned three years before the Nottingham attacks that Calocane’s mental illness was so severe he could “end up killing someone”.

It was one of a series of missed opportunities over three years that could have prevented the killings, Calocane’s mother and brother told BBC Panorama in their first interview.

The doctor’s warning appeared in a 300-page summary of medical records the family received only after Calocane was sentenced for the killings, which they have shared with Panorama.

After the CQC report, the families of Calocane’s victims said those responsible for failings in his care have “blood on their hands”.