Nottingham inquiry hears killer’s mother sought hospital admission, Mental Health Act decision kept Valdo Calocane in community, Risk passes between NHS and police until it doesn’t

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Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar were fatally stabbed (PA) independent.co.uk

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A public inquiry into the 2023 Nottingham killings heard on Monday that Valdo Calocane’s mother asked for her son to be admitted to hospital after a violent psychotic episode in May 2020, three years before he killed three people in the city. According to The Independent, Calocane—diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia—was assessed by clinicians who decided he could be treated in the community rather than detained under the Mental Health Act.

The hearing revisited a sequence that reads less like a single mistake than a system designed to pass risk along. After Calocane was found “repeatedly kicking and punching” a neighbour’s door and was described as hearing voices and not sleeping for five days, one doctor said he was leaning toward detention but the team discussed research on the “over-representation of young Black males in detention,” the inquiry was told. The Independent reports that shortly after being released, Calocane attempted to get into another neighbour’s flat; the woman was so frightened she jumped from a first-floor window and suffered serious spinal injuries. Only the next day, after another assessment, was he recommended for sectioning.

The inquiry’s task is formally broad—scrutinising prosecutors, police and medical professionals—but its early evidence shows how accountability dissolves across organisational boundaries. Clinicians can document that they followed an assessment process; police can record an arrest and a handover; prosecutors can later argue about thresholds and charging decisions. Each institution can close its own file while the shared outcome—whether the person is safely contained, treated, or monitored—belongs to no single budget line.

That is why the details of “risk” matter. The inquiry heard there were later records suggesting “no incidents of violence” before Calocane was discharged, despite episodes that included forced entry into a neighbour’s flat and the window-jump incident. In bureaucratic terms, a risk history can be erased not by a cover-up but by classification: an event becomes a housing dispute, a mental-health episode becomes “non-violent,” a near-killing becomes an unfortunate consequence of fear.

The race-related evidence cited in the assessment adds another layer: it can function as a procedural shield. A clinician can point to published research and equality duties while making a decision that, in practice, increases danger for the public and for the patient’s family. The inquiry was told the doctor insisted demographic factors did not determine the decision, yet the research discussion remained part of the documented rationale.

Calocane was later given an indefinite hospital order after admitting manslaughter by diminished responsibility and attempted murder. The inquiry is now replaying the earlier moments when the cheapest, most administratively defensible option was to keep him in the community.

On the day his mother asked for inpatient treatment, the system produced paperwork showing he was safe enough to release.