Three people were killed by paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane in Nottingham – including Barnaby Webber, whose brother reveals the lasting effect of the tragedy that shocked the nation
The Little brother of one of the victims in the Nottingham attacks says the tragedy aged him five years instantly. Now Charlie Webber, who was 15 when his brother Barnaby was killed by Valdo Calocane, says he wants to ‘be more Barney’.
The nation was horrified after three people were killed on the streets of Nottingham by a man who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Charlie, told the Sunday Times how he heard about the deadly attack three years ago, after returning from a school trip in Devon. He was just 15-years-old when he was told by a teacher that his parents were on the way in to collect him.
He immediately sensed something was wrong and suspected it was to do with Barnaby, who was a student at Nottingham University.
His parents arrived and he was told ‘there’d been an incident in Nottingham and they thought Barney had passed away.’
“When I heard those words, it was like my world flipped upside down…I was in year 10, first year of GCSEs, just come back from messing around with my mates on a school trip. Suddenly there were news crews outside our front door … I aged five years just like that.”
His brother, who he describes as his “hero” and “best friend”, was stabbed to death alongside another student, Grace O’Malley-Kumar, as they were on their way home from a night out.
Students Barnaby and Grace, both 19, and school caretaker Ian Coates, 65, were fatally stabbed in the early hours of June 13th, 2023.
They’d been killed by Calocane, a 31-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who had been sectioned four times and had an outstanding arrest warrant. He is currently under an indefinite hospital order after pleading guilty to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and three counts of attempted murder.
Charlie, now 18, has just finished his A-level exams and has been accepted to read history at Cardiff University, the same subject Barnaby was studying. Eventually he told the Sunday Times he wants to to a law conversion.
In September he will turn 19, the same age his brother was when he died. “It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around,” he says. “In my head, Barney is three or four years on, but actually he’s frozen at 19.”
Charlie told how he has been trying to honour his ‘hero’ and is helping out the Barnaby Webber Foundation ahead of his gap year.
Since the attacks, Charlie and his mum Emma and dad David, alongside Grace’s and Ian’s families have been travelling to London to attend hearings for the Nottingham inquiry. It concluded earlier this month and its findings published next May.
The inquiry concluded earlier this month and its findings will be published next May. Mrs Webber recently demanded a meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer after she said Calocane “got away with murder.”
Charlie, who works part time in a pub, attended the hearing between exams. “It’s been hard to focus, not just on exams but on anything in general.” He said in some ways his exams had been “quite a nice escape” and made him feel “like every other 18-year-old”.
After his brother was killed Charlie took a month off school and said he didn’t go for counselling at first “because I just wanted to be normal again. I was 15 or 16, I didn’t want the stigma. I kept saying there was nothing wrong with me, that I was fine. Speaking about my feelings is just not something I wanted to do.” But he later did open up and it helped him “massively”, he says.
After Calocane’s sentencing in January 2024, where prosecutors concluded there was “no realistic prospect of conviction for murder”, Charlie wrote on Instagram: “This murderous monster tore my once beautiful family apart. I will not stand by and accept the verdict that he is not a murderer.”
Charlie told the Sunday Times he was “not in a good state mentally” after the sentencing, “I was not in a good state mentally. I was really upset, really angry,” Charlie says. “I could feel the anger slowly building up, and that’s when I realised I had to dial myself in and focus this energy on something that can be positive.”
He has now thrown himself into the Barnaby Webber Foundation, a charity that supports ‘young people who are facing life challenges’ and is following the family’s motto to “be more Barney.
“I felt like I needed to step up and get behind the cause. I needed to fight for what we think is right.”
He said after his brother died he felt “a little bit of pressure, because my parents had already lost so much. I was trying to keep myself out of trouble, away from anything bad, away from being in danger. I kept thinking, my parents have already lost a child. If something happened to me, it’d be brutal for them.”
Now, he said, he still “thinks carefully” about how his decisions could affect them. “I make sure I’m not doing something that could massively affect people down the line.”
Charlie told the Sunday Times he knows the pain and grief will never leave, and there will always be “the really low moments”, but added “It also gives you a bigger appreciation that life is so fragile. It makes the good moments feel so much better, in a weird way.”
The teen described his favourite memory of his brother, a car journey a few weeks before Barnaby’s death. He’d been to visit Barnaby at university and they were all driving back to Taunton, the last trip Barnaby would ever take home.
Usually, Charlie would travel with his parents, but this time he had a lift with his brother.
“We’d always been really close, but that car journey was like the first time we had a real adult conversation, we spoke about everything,” he smiles. “Going back in the car with Barnaby was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made … It’s three hours I’ll cherish for ever.”
