None of us can have watched last year’s unfolding events in Southport without horror and revulsion: just unfathomable, even in the worst nightmares, to think someone could invade a little girls’ dance event in the summer holidays and slaughter three girls whilst attempting to kill and harm as many people as possible. The staff there, some of them injured, seem to have been incredibly brave and it’s all just so horrible. It’s also had a major impact on the first responders which needs to be recognised as well.
We now know, Mr Rudakubana was under the care of NHS mental health services for four years, 2019-2023, disengaging around 18mths before the attacks. We also know there was police contact in Lancashire and his parents had been warned to hide potential weapons – so much contact has occurred it will be hard to imagine the public inquiry will find little or nothing having gone badly wrong here.
From the word go, we saw speculation about the attacker’s mental health – we saw speculation about an awful lot more, it must be said, but mental health was right up there as the ‘obvious’ explanation for these events. We saw little which specifically pointed to that in the run up to sentencing but as I was following BBC News yesterday, there was mention of the defendant having high-functioning autism (an outdate term, but the one used by the judge during sentencing) but there was little mention of any contact with services but I did spend all day yesterday minded to wonder whether the defendant has been engaging with anyone at all, including his defence team and whether that explained why certain things weren’t being put forward on his behalf.
MENTAL HEALTH
I was originally planning to stay clear of this incident because of the lack of clear information about mental health or mental health care being relevant – hence it’s been entirely unmentioned on this website and on my social media feeds until today. Of course, I was wondering about it as I do for many high-profile cases and my ‘success rate’ in correctly predicting where mental health was and wasn’t relevant is reasonably good but I don’t commit to writing about cases until we learn something specific, as we did this afternoon.
And that’s the reason for a change of mind: confirmation the defendant, who has a high-functioning form of autism was under the care of NHS mental health services from Alder Hey hospital, Liverpool from 2019 to 2023. This included care from their community services from which he apparently disengaged in February 2023, roughly eighteen months before the horrific attacks which just attracted the second longest minimum term tariff in UK criminal history – at 52yrs – and the longest for offences by a child and it’s worth noting, UK Law Officers have already received a request to consider whether his sentence was unduly lenient.
There has been a lot of chat about mental health since we learned of the defendant’s surprise change of plea at the start of the week. There was the oddity of him communicating his guilty pleas non-verbally, there was the lack of any significant contribution from his defence team to the sentencing processes, there was little to no mention of psychiatric reports of questions about fitness to plead beyond confirmation no psychiatric evidence would be offered, despite mentioning of high-functioning autism in the judge’s sentencing remarks. Looking from the outside, I had to wonder more than once whether he was entirely disengaging from his defence team as well as from everything else.
In particular, there was specific discussion online from psychiatrists about this case. Some were merely expressing surprise at the lack of psychiatric information, others more specifically stating they were so satisfied something was going on here, they had to wonder why the legal professionals in the court hadn’t asked more questions about his fitness to plead or the need for psychiatric reports. One forensic psychiatrist argued there should have been full psychiatric evaluation before the trial took place – in fairness, I’m yet to read anything that tells us this did not happen whilst he was on remand in prison but none of that was mentioned during sentencing so it probably didn’t.
ALL SPECULATION
This is all speculation and half a story, isn’t it?! – and many will argue it’s unhelpful, even inappropriate. It’s for those reasons I stayed away from the topic until learning today of 3-4yrs of mental health treatment from specialist teams at Alder Hey, including community MH care. It seems fair now to wonder what will happen next because we are where we are. Regardless of how we got to the point where he’s now in prison for life, he’s now pleaded guilty, that has been accepted by the Crown Court and he has been sentenced, the least that will happen is an unduly lenient decision, a public inquiry and who knows what kind of further assessment of his mental health.
The public inquiry takes place after comments already made by the Prime Minister about things having gone wrong so it has been set up to bring certain conclusions already. There were the previous behaviours, including a criminal conviction for possession of a knife; the attempt before the killings to attend his own school with a weapon, the various referrals to PREVENT and now, the disengagement from mental health services at Alder Hey. We can only wonder about whether that disengagement was correctly handled – on one level, patients are free to disengage as long as they have mental capacity to make those decisions and notwithstanding his legal status as a child, mental capacity laws kick in aged 16yrs so decisions remain his. On the other hand, disengagement from services can be for a number of reasons and sometimes patients should have been followed up – as is being argued in the Nottingham attacks in 2023.
So what might happen now? – well, the Prison system has hold of him and will have to get to grips with a large number of issues, including how to keep him safe from any number of people who would undoubtedly wish to do him harm. But also, they will have to form a view about his health issues, including mental health. It’s hard to say what will happen because a lot of detail is still not public but one version of what might happen is psychiatric assessment, either in prison or in hospital and we’re bound to learn much more during the public inquiry. We can also wonder until then whether he had additional mental health needs, above and beyond autism if he was under community services for four years.
And it strikes me that understanding the detail of this one is perhaps more important than normal, because of the particular horror, impact and utter inexplicability of it – devastation was wrought not just over 29 victims and their families / friends, but over the entire country and events in the Crown Court this week really take us no closer to understanding what on earth just happened.
Winner of the President’s Medal, the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Winner of the Mind Digital Media Award
All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation.
(c) Michael Brown, 2025.
I am not a police officer.
I try to keep this blog up to date, but inevitably over time, amendments to the law as well as court rulings and other findings from inquests and complaints processes mean it is difficult to ensure all the articles and pages remain current. Please ensure you check all legal issues in particular and take appropriate professional advice where necessary.
Government legislation website – www.legislation.gov.uk
Mental Health Cop 