Nottingham Attacks: the failures that let a killer roam free
6/29/202641 min
Valdo Calocane was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He'd been arrested and sectioned for violent offences multiple times. He was known to carry knives. And yet on a June morning in 2023, he was free to roam the streets of Nottingham, where he killed three innocent people.
In this episode, Emma Webber - mother of 19-year-old victim Barnaby - tells Andy and Neil about her fight for answers. She reveals how the families discovered the deaths were preventable, the litany of failures by police and mental health services that left Calocane free to kill, and her fury that not a single person has been held accountable for the errors that cost Barnaby, Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates their lives.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[digital music] This is a global production.
Emma Webber· Guest0:04
In that moment, almost in a heartbeat, everything changed again for the second time that year. He'd been sectioned four times. Every single time was because of violence against others. It's terrifying how he goes from calm to absolutely manic and violent within a nanosecond. There was screaming at night. There was odd behavior in the, in the early hours of the morning. He brought in a dead animal and left it in the bath. There were downloads on his phone and downloads on a memory stick of live shootings, of the Christchurch massacres, of extremist violence, of how to use knives, guns. Never, um, discount the white hot fury that runs through my veins.
Speaker 10:45
[gentle music] The Crime Agents.
Andy Hughes· Host0:49
Welcome to this episode of The Crime Agents with me, crime journalist Andy Hughes.
Neil Basu· Host0:53
And me, the ex-cop Neil Basso.
Andy Hughes· Host0:54
We're talking today about one of the most horrific attacks in recent history in the UK, and it wasn't just a horrific attack on that day, but what this did was expose huge failings in policing, huge failings in mental health services, but also shone a huge light of scrutiny on the criminal justice system itself. I remember I came into the Sky News newsroom, um, one morning in June 2023,