Mental health staff did not effectively act upon a man's grave concerns reported to them about his severely unwell cousin – hours before he was brutally murdered by him.
The day before the fatal attack, Ryan attended a doctor's appointment with him, where Rowen said he had not been taking his medication as it made him sleepy and he had put on weight. When Rowen answered he said he was fine and was on business in the Trafford Centre - and there was no further follow up from mental health services. That evening, Rowen went to a meeting with the Freemasons - he later told a friend that the Freemasons 'fed me my mum'.
Rowen, a tree surgeon, had been twice sectioned under the Mental Health Act before he committed the fatal attack. Among the issues highlighted by the investigation was that, in the various assessments Rowen had under GMMH services, the identification and assessment of risk did not accurately reflect the danger he posed to others, reads the report.These risk assessments were consistently incomplete, continued investigators.
Based on this presentation, mental health staff decided Rowen was not a high-risk patient that required ongoing, intensive monitoring, and that further information about his restraining order or sex offending register was not needed. The investigation also said that the mental health carer calling Rowen after Ryan lodged concerns was a ‘proportionate response’. But the report added that ‘it was not uncommon’ for community mental health team managers ‘to be recruited without having extensive experience in managing such a complex service’.