Jo Billington can vividly remember the moment police came to her home in Crosby, Liverpool, at 5am on 6 September 2020. They told her that her 23-year-old son, Jacob, had been killed in Birmingham, where he had been on a night out with his friends.
“They left saying ‘we don’t know anything about the incident, we just know Jacob has passed away. It’s all in the news,’” she said. “They gave me a non-emergency number to call but after an hour of trying to get through I rang 999 and said to the call handler: ‘I’ve just been told my son has been killed in Birmingham, can somebody help me?’ It was pretty grim.”
Jacob’s family, along with his best friend, Michael Callaghan, who was seriously injured, have been waiting a long time for a report on how Zephaniah McLeod, a violent criminal with a history of mental health issues who had recently been released from prison, was able to stab eight people that night.
The 176-page document, originally due to be released in January 2022, contains extensive detail about McLeod’s interactions with police, probation, prison and mental health services over the years.
But the families are angry about the report’s recommendations, which they do not think will secure any meaningful change, and what they see as a lack of explanation as to not just how but why things went so wrong.
“If you don’t know why something has gone wrong, how can you correct it? So I was very disappointed when I got the report,” Billington said.
Callaghan was stabbed in the neck by McLeod and had a “catastrophic, inevitable stroke” followed by “pneumonia so severe he was medically paralysed”, according to the report. He has since relearned to walk but is still unable to use his left arm.
“I don’t think the urgency this has been treated with matches the severity of the impact on our lives,” Callaghan said.
“Michael didn’t know about Jacob until he came out of the coma, after the funeral had happened and everything,” said his mother, Anne Callaghan. “He was just utterly distraught and had woken up paralysed.”
McLeod’s other victims included Shane Rowley, whom he stabbed in the torso six times, the wounds penetrating her lung, liver, kidney and bowel. He stabbed Thomas Glassey twice in the chest, and slashed at the face of Migle Dolobauskaite as she sat outside a train station.
The Billington and Callaghan families pushed to have their victim impact statements included in the final report to ensure the ultimate consequences of McLeod’s actions were not lost.
“I don’t want it called ‘the incident’,” Billington said. “This was a young man stabbed through both his main neck arteries bleeding to death in the street. Let’s not soften that because we can’t soften it, it’s our son.”
She hopes a coroner will grant an article 2 inquest into her son’s death, to establish whether his human rights were breached by the state’s inability to protect him from the harm McLeod posed.
In November 2021, when McLeod received a 21-year prison sentence, it became clear that a failure to adequately grasp the severity of his mental illness was a significant factor in the case.
“Given your past medical history, it is a matter of considerable concern that you were simply lost in the system for some weeks,” the judge Mr Justice Pepperall said in his sentencing remarks.
But the families were unprepared for the scale of mismanagement exposed in the report.
“I was amazed at how bad it was over such a long period of time, because this is really the end of 10 years of a lack of treatment,” Billington said. “He was definitely psychotically ill, but he was also a violent career criminal as well. I think sometimes the two sets of things weren’t seen as a joint problem. His offending behaviour was never seen in the context of his mental illness. So all the time he fell between these cracks between the two services.”
Anne Callaghan said: “I don’t want to go back to the days where people got sectioned and thrown into institutions. But it seems like a lot of red flags were just ignored and ignored and ignored. They were normalising completely unacceptable things.”
Their sons were good friends, attending Sheffield University together and since graduation spending their spare time creating music for their band, The Vedetts, with Michael as lead singer and Jacob on drums.
Scattered on the coffee table in front of them are photos of Michael and Jacob with their friends over the years – at music festivals, on the log flume at Alton Towers, playing in the band.
“In the sentencing we heard the 999 call and you could hear the panic and terror in their friend’s voices as they said ‘how do we stop the bleeding?’. They had two people with arterial neck injuries, so you can imagine what that scene was like,” Billington said.
“It’s not to be sensationalist, it’s just to say these are the outcomes of things like this for real people. These weren’t missed opportunities, these were failings and people not doing their job properly. It’s very difficult to forgive.”
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