GB News
A police offer described the Nottingham students who were stabbed to death after a night out as “proper butchered” in a “barbaric” WhatsApp message.
Grace O’Malley Kumar and Barnaby Webber, both 19, were killed by Valdo Calocane, 32, in the early hours of June 13, 2023.
The families of the teenagers said they were horrified by the language used by officers in the aftermath of their deaths.
One message sent by an officer said: “So 2 students on Ilkeston Road have been proper butchered, 4 section [officers] turned up and tried to hold their inners in. Suspects then made off and attacked a man in a car on magdala [road] and stabbed him to death.”
Another officer, PC Matt Gell, then shared the WhatsApp message with his wife and a friend.
Both the unidentified officer and Gell have since been reprimanded, however, the details were held behind closed doors and the families only found out about the message in February, The Times has reported.
Emma Webber, the mother of Barnaby, has now written an open letter to the officers in the WhatsApp group where the message was published.
She said that she only gone public with the information because Chief Constable Kate Meynell, whose son was on the WhatsApp group, has refused to pass a private letter to its members explaining the effect of their words.
“The callous, degrading and desensitised manner of your comments have caused more trauma than you can imagine,” she wrote in the publication the officers.
“When you say ‘a couple of students have been properly butchered’ did you stop to think about the absolute terror that they felt in the moment when they were ambushed and repeatedly stabbed by a man who had planned his attack and lay waiting in the shadows for them?
“When you say ‘innards out and everything’ did you think about the agony they felt and the final thoughts that went through their minds as this vicious individual inflicted wounds so serious that they had no chance of surviving?”
Dr Sanjoy Kumar, Grace’s father, told The Telegraph that the messages “were as barbaric as the crime itself”.
“The message is so disgusting and shows there is no humanity left. Would anyone with a child, a mother, a relative use words like that?”
He questioned if the police in Nottingham had forgotten that they were referring to children in those messages.
“The message is as barbaric as the crime for me. I’m so, so disappointed by Nottinghamshire Police”, he continued.
Nottinghamshire Police has declined to comment on Webber’s letter.
Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, also killed 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates. He was given an indefinite hospital order for manslaughter by diminished responsibility in January after Nottingham Crown Court heard he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Gell, who forwarded the message on, was given a written warning after he looked up information relating to Calocane despite having no part in the investigation, with a panel at a hearing later agreeing he had a “a lapse of judgment”.
Around 180 police staff were found to have viewed material relating to the case, with 11 of them having no “legitimate reason” to do so.
Nottinghamshire Police has since referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.