A violent teenager, who was bailed after he attacked three people in Brighton, tried to kill a six-year-old boy less than four months later at the Tate Modern art gallery in London.
Jonty Bravery hurled the young French child from a 10th floor viewing platform. The boy fell 100ft – about 30 metres – and landed on a fifth-floor roof, leaving him seriously injured.
Now, a serious case review has found that Bravery was not considered a risk despite a string of violent incidents – and had been remanded on unconditional bail by a youth court after the episode in Brighton.
Bravery was 17 when he punched and headbutted his carer Tawfiq Ibrahim in Burger King on Brighton seafront and attacked Logan Elliot, a teenage member of staff at the restaurant, in April 2019.
Later he attacked a Sussex Police custody assistant Amy Boarer and caused damage to the police building in Brighton where he was being held.
When he was jailed for attempted murder for a minimum of 15 years by a judge at the Old Bailey in June last year, the Brighton charges were ordered to lie on the file.
He carried out the attack in the Tate Modern on Sunday 4 August 2019, three and a half months after he became violent in the Brighton seafront branch of Burger King.
The serious case review, seen by the Press Association news agency, highlighted a series of violent incidents in the two years before he struck.
It included other examples of troubling behaviour such as putting faeces in his mother’s make-up brushes and threatening to kill members of the public.
But it concluded that Bravery’s violent behaviour had reduced at the time of the Tate Modern attack.
He was living in a bespoke placement, in Ealing, west London, with two-to-one care funded by Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council and the local clinical commissioning group (CCG).
The report said: “There was no recent evidence that he (Bravery) presented a risk to other children or adults unknown to him.
“It was in this context that he was progressively given more freedoms which saw him able to visit central London unaccompanied on the day of the incident.”
The review also found that Bravery’s case was characterised by “appropriate efforts by professionals from across agencies to access assessment and treatment for (him)”.
But those efforts “were stymied due to the lack of services, placements and provisions that were suitable for his needs as an autistic young person with a co-existing conduct disorder diagnosis”.
The review listed seven findings, including a lack of residential treatment options for young people with high-risk behaviours, emerging personality disorder and co-existing autism.
It also found disincentives for support staff to escalate service gaps, creating an unmet need on behalf of the service user.
The serious case review said that Bravery had autism diagnosed when he was five but that there was a clear “lack of join-up between different elements of support that were being provided to (Bravery) and his family”.
He was not known to children’s social services or Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) until more than 10 years later.
Bravery’s anti-social personality disorder was not diagnosed until he was arrested for the Tate Modern attack.
He had spent various periods of time being moved from psychiatric intensive care units, specialist residential schools and hotels from the age of 15 as his behaviour became more troubling.
Frustrated
His father told the review that he felt “frustrated” at the apparent lack of expertise of private care providers in dealing with his son.
The review said that Bravery was taken to hospital twice in May 2016, once for overdosing on tea tree oil and then for purposefully ingesting paint in an art lesson.
His medication was increased and he was treated for two weeks on an inpatient psychiatric unit.
But that unit was said to be an “extremely stressful environment” for someone with autism, as was the psychiatric intensive care unit in northern England where he spent several months – an experience his parents described as “extremely damaging to his wellbeing”.
Bravery was then sent to a residential school, where he attacked a fellow pupil after losing a ten-pin bowling game. The review said that the injuries “could have been life-threatening”.
The local authority approached “over 60 establishments” to find a suitable alternative for Bravery, but all “either felt that (Bravery) presented a higher risk than they could safely manag, or had no vacancies”, the review found.
He was sent to a specialist children’s home where his brief stay was characterised by “several violent incidents”.
Brick attack
On one occasion he attacked a member of staff with a brick after being told that his poor behaviour at a local leisure centre would be documented in his behaviour report.
A few days later, Bravery assaulted a police officer called to his room amid concerns that he was secreting a brick.
The teenager was later sent to live in a flat in west London but had to move after he attacked a member of care staff and dragged her along the floor by her hair.
A year before the Tate attack, Bravery called police to his flat and said that he was thinking of killing people. He assaulted one of the officers.
The next month he made two claims to support staff that he wanted to go out in the community to “assault a member of the public and be arrested and put in prison”.
Staff believed that he was making these statements to provoke a reaction from the support worker.
The review said: “It is evident that professionals working with (Bravery) at this time did not think he would act on these statements which were seen as attention-seeking behaviour.
Threats
“This was because all of (Bravery’s) actions were viewed as products of his autistic behaviour and there was no consideration of these threats in a context of conduct disorder.”
Less than four months before the Tate attack, he assaulted a member of staff at Burger King in Brighton after punching his care worker.
The review said: “Unfortunately (Bravery) also had incidents of premeditated instrumental aggression that were not explained by his autism and therefore were unlikely to be resolved through such therapy.
“The fact that these incidents were rare, though could be dangerous, made it easier for them to drift from view.”
The review also found the “apparent abruptness of the escalation” of Bravery’s situation – such as sending him to a psychiatric hospital when he was 14 – to be a “striking feature” of his case.
It added: “The mismatch between (Bravery’s) needs and available provision ran through the whole of (his) case.”
The review said Bravery, now 19, needed residential therapeutic solutions that could enable him, as an autistic young person, to engage in a treatment regime for his conduct disorder.
“But such a residential option did not exist,” it added. “This meant that the legal frameworks available provided limited options for Bravery at the time.”
