The mother of the Nottingham triple killer said she was not concerned when he claimed to hear voices during an ‘upsetting’ incident two years before he stabbed three people to death.
Celeste Calocane said she had been reassured by professionals about her son Valdo Calocane’s mental health condition after recently being sectioned for violence.
Yet the paranoid schizophrenic turned up unannounced at the family home in Wales in July 2021, having had infrequent contact with them before then, and spoke about voices in his head.
Calocane refused to come into the house, something his mother thought was ‘really strange’.
However, she did not raise this issue with Calocane’s mental health team because she was concerned she was ‘overreacting’.
An inquiry is looking into how Calocane was free to fatally stab students Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, both 19, and school caretaker Ian Coates, 65, during a rampage in June 2023.
Giving evidence today, intensive care nurse Mrs Calocane said she repeatedly felt like she was ‘doing the job’ for mental health services, picking up on ‘red flags’ her son was demonstrating, and raising concerns about his care in the community.
Calocane had already been sectioned and arrested for three violent incidents since his mental health deteriorated during lockdown while studying for a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Nottingham.
Celeste Calocane, mother of Nottingham triple killer Valdo, gave evidence to the inquiry into the atrocity today
Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber – known as Barney – and Grace O’Malley-Kumar were killed in Nottingham by paranpoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane
And in May 2021, he turned up outside MI5 headquarters in London demanding to speak to someone before being sent on his way by police.
Six weeks later, he drove four-and-a-half hours to see his family but remained outside the entire time.
Mrs Calocane said: ‘He refused to come into the house. He said that the people in his head would be able to see inside our home and would put them in danger.
‘He explained that in addition to the voices, people were able to access his vision like a camera, read his mind and give him visions and dreams.
‘He told us that this was called “remote neural monitoring”.
‘I found it all really upsetting.’
Mrs Calocane added: ‘I knew it didn’t make sense and he wasn’t well but I didn’t tell anyone from the mental health team as I felt I had already raised it a few times when I thought he wasn’t well and they had said he was fine.
‘I thought that maybe I was overreacting as his mum and that I was not seeing what the professionals (were) seeing as I was not a psychiatrist and I had no training but they did.’
Calocane, now 34, has been jailed for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished reponsibility and is serving a hospital order
She said she already phoned his mental health team in May to flag concerns who reassured her everything.
She told the inquiry: ‘I thought, maybe this is the new Valdo. I just have to get used to it… Maybe I just need to adjust to this new life now.’
The inquiry heard notes from May 2020 showed Mrs Calocane wanted her son to be taken to hospital after being arrested for damaging student accommodation.
She flagged concerns he was a ‘risk to others’. The inquiry has already heard how a consultant psychiatrist also warned the following month that Calocane ‘would end up killing someone’.
Counsel to the inquiry Rachel Langdale KC asked: ‘You were satisfied you did say that? “His current mental state is a risk to others.”
‘You recognised that and wanted him to go to hospital for treatment?’
Mrs Calocane replied: ‘Yes definitely, I wanted him to go to hospital. I did not understand the extent of the risk, but I wanted it.’
She said the last time she saw her son was in November 2022, but ‘there wasn’t anything there’.
She told the inquiry: ‘It wasn’t the Valdo that I knew, that I raised in my house.
‘When I looked at him, he was empty.’
Calocane is serving an indefinite hospital order after prosecutors accepted his pleas of manslaughter by diminished responsibility, something the victims’ families remain upset about.
The inquiry continues.
