TW: Domestic abuse/murder/child death

[Merryoldgoat]

Norwich deaths: Girls died of knife wounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-68079209

I’m so sick of reading about these men. How can we stop this? I feel utterly ruined by it all.

I can think of times where women have had a breakdown and killed their children. Several in fact. For one, there was a mother in lockdown with a disabled child. Another was a woman in the US who killed her children while her husband went out to buy pizza.

It's a desperately sad story.

The statistics don't lie - 94% of family annihilators are men. We do have a male problem and that's a simple fact and the people that bear the wrath of that are women and children.

Hindsight is 20/20. I'm pretty sure that he didn't ring up saying he'd got a knife and was going to kill his family. He asked for help with his mental health, which isn't the role of Police. They just physically can't send out cops to everyone who rings saying they need help with their mental health - they've tried that and ended up with no cops to attend serious and violent crime and other crime. If they had a crystal ball, then yes, they probably would have sent someone out.
Yes, Police have a duty of care, but their powers re mental health are actually very limited and can not be used in a person's home. They probably referred it to the mental health team, who are not really set up to respond like emergency services - which is the problem with mental health services, not the Police. They also probably contacted ambulance too, but would have likely had an 8 hour response time, but because let's face it, the ambulance are on their knees as well.
The resources of the emergency service are not infinite - the call would have been graded with what they knew at the time and this outcome would have been considered very low with all the information they had available - again, that where that crystal ball would come in handy.

If he had the prescence of mind to call the police, why did he not then remove himself from the situation.

Many suicidal people make their way to A&E instead of the alternative.

I suppose they will work out exactly what should have been done differently.

Tragic for this family.

Oh and the likelihood is, if the cops had put this for a welfare check, the response time would have probably at minimum an hour, if not within 24 hours... He'd have still already done it.

You have to really scratch around for a story though. Why are we so desperate every single time to defend men. The statistics speak for themselves.

You don't, sadly. There was one not very far from me only last month.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67833723

This is an incredibly sad story, thoughts go to all involved.

Mothers killing small children is one of the few areas where male and female rates of murder are even comparable. Men kill a lot more in every other setting.

I think you really would have to scratch around to find a case where a woman kills an adult male, a teenage daughter and an 8 year old and is acting alone.

The reason that is newsworthy is because it is rare. Children are at their most vulnerable to violence in the home at 18months-4yo and in most cases the perpetrator is the mother's partner. Far more common than the a violent mother.
Men hurt women and children far.more frequently than women do.

It's a very sad story but he was clearly severely mentally unwell and had phoned 999 himself that day. Had he not taken his own life, my guess is that he might have served most of his sentence in a secure mental hospital rather than a prison. I assume that at some point some more details will be revealed as part the enquiry into the police failures, but at the moment we have no idea what his mental state was - for all we know he might have been in the grip of psychosis or schizophrenia. Without knowing the precise nature of his mental health issues, we just don't know whether this was a case of someone killing their children because he didn't want them taken away, or a case of someone killing their children because he sincerely believed they were incarnations of Satan and and was hearing the voice of God telling him to kill them to save humanity from extinction.

The reporting of this story has been really weird. It was obvious from day 1 who was responsible and they already reported the knife wounds so how is this breaking news today? Just come out and say family annihilation.

There will definitely be legal reasons for this. Reporting of crimes like this is way, way more complicated than you might imagine. There are a lot of restrictions which might apply, and some of those restrictions might be in place to protect other family members.

It's also not a 'typical' family annihilation. The woman who died wasn't the children's mother and she didn't live at the property - she was their aunt and was visiting.

It's unclear at the moment whether they know whether the children's mother is, because they haven't mentioned her at all in any of the coverage, but the police had visited the house in connection with a missing person case before Christmas, so it seems likely that the missing person was her.

Bear in mind that, if they don't know where the mother is, there might be an awful lot that they're not able to say until they've located her.

It might have taken them time to get there, but an assurance that 'someone is coming' might have been enough to stop him - if he thought that someone could arrive and be of some help to him. Without knowing his state of mind, of course, the committment to turning up COULD have been enough to give him pause and wait for help to arrive.

I dont think we can assume that he called 999 before killing them,it could have been after and he started to realise what he had done?
The missing person previously was him and he was found wandering and taken to hospital by police,where he walked out without treatment and may never have been followed up on.
According to neighbours,the mother had moved out and the aunt was there to help with the girls.
A friend of the mothers has commented,that she has been informed ,I dont know where she is.
R.I.P.

Without knowing what he said when he called - as I said, they have to assess it on the information available at that time... Genuinely can't just send cops out on a "what if" everytime- if they did call an ambulance, they'd have told him that and the attendance time amd/or if they flagged it to local mental health team (most have a MH nurse working in control rooms these days, who can also provide them info to help make a decision for deployment too)
Whatever he said and whatever information they had, did not grade the call for deployment. That crystal ball wasn't working.

Yes, I was answering someone who said that he would have done it anyway, even if help had been despatched. My point was that he might not have done. It's all academic anyway.

The reason the case in the OP is newsworthy is also that it's rare.

Families being murdered by those in the family IS rare, thankfully.

Yes, more men than women commit these crimes. That is undeniably true. It is also true that women have committed these crimes.

The man phoned 999 and said he’d wanted to kill his wife. He was ignored. This was a failure by the NHS/police.🙁

His wife was not there and according to neighbours hadnt been seen there recently,so he wouldnt have said that.It was reported he said he was feeling 'confused'Sadly,he may have already killed his family,we dont know that yet.

It is overwhelmingly a male crime. Why are you so determined to try and make it something else?

Most women wouldn't be able to overpower their husband and two daughters at the same time using only a knife.

Are you always this sympathetic to murderers?
Im getting pretty tired of these criminals using the mental health card to justify killing people.
Same excuse today from Nottingham from the guy who murdered 3 people.
The father of one of the victims, a doctor, said it was outrageous that the murderer of his beautiful daughter was pulling the mental health card and pleading manslaughter not murder.

It's not the mother of the kids I don't think, it's her sister... mother is "missing"

when I read that I couldn't decide if he had offed her first and the sister had come looking and then he's done the sister too... Bit the sister came looking for her sister, and now she's dead

I agree with this. He did call 999 himself. The police took an hour to respond

I'm not. I literally said men commit this at a higher rate than women.

Why are you trying to paint over the facts you don't like?

Thankyou. @quisensoucie please don't question screamingly obvious facts for effect if you can't be bothered to carry out the most basic Google checks.
You're not impressing anyone with your faux independent mind, you just sound ignorant and foolish.
Men murder women at shocking rates- to pretend there's anywhere close to the same risk of women killing men is absolutely pathetic.
It's a national and global epidemic of male violence and misogyny and trying to pretend that's not true is only helping more women get killed and more men get away with it.
Get the programme for gods sake.