The partner of a man killed in the Nottingham attacks has told an inquiry it felt like he had been killed twice because she was first told he died in a road accident.
Caretaker Ian Coates, 65, was fatally stabbed by paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane more than an hour after undergraduates Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, were killed in the early hours of 13 June 2023.
After stealing Mr Coates’ van, Calocane ran over and seriously injured three pedestrians. Calocane admitted manslaughter and attempted murder and was indefinitely detained at a high-security hospital.
Mr Coates’ long-term partner, Elaine Newton, told the public inquiry into the attacks that police first told her that Mr Coates had died in a road traffic accident (RTA).
She talked about her initial denial, telling officers: “He’s at work, it’s not Ian.”
Ms Newton said it took four hours before she was told the truth.
She said when police liaison officers later asked her to tell them what she knew about what happened, she said she knew that he was in a road traffic accident.
“And they looked shocked on their faces and said ‘You’ve got the wrong information, you’ve been told the wrong information. Ian’s been killed and he’s been stabbed’,” Ms Newton told the inquiry.
Answering how it felt to be told how Mr Coates had really died, she said: “It felt like he’d been killed twice. It wasn’t right.”
“The first information, I accepted, but the second I couldn’t accept. You don’t know which one was true, or have they got the wrong person. It was not right, it was a mess,” she said.
Mr Coates’ son, James Coates, told the inquiry that he found out his father had died through an Instagram message from a family friend.
He said he initially thought the message was a hoax.
While he said he had been aware of an incident in Nottingham which had caused police to cordon off roads, and later that someone had been killed on Magdala Road, which was closed to where he lived, he said he had no idea it was his father.
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“It wasn’t until 3pm that I was walking up the road to my house that I decided to check Instagram. I’d not got notifications on, but I got a message from [a family friend] saying ‘I can’t believe what’s happened to your dad, please ring me’,” he told the inquiry.
“And my first instinct is it’s a hoax message and it’s been hacked and trying to get me to ring this number and then I asked her is this a joke and she messaged again reiterating that I should call her.
“She was in hysterics, she said my dad had been involved in an RTA but she had seen what was going off in Nottingham. I still didn’t believe it.”
James said the family only received a call from Nottinghamshire Police 10 minutes before a press conference by the former chief constable, Kate Meynell, to let Nottingham residents know what had happened.
By that point, they had tried calling a helpline they saw on TV, the non-emergency number 101, and even 999 to find out what had happened to their father.
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“By then, we’d pieced almost everything together ourselves from social media and the news so then it was just a case of them apologising that we had to do that,” he said.
He added: “Police logs showed my number was available to police at 12 minutes to eight in the morning and we didn’t get a call back until around 5pm, [which] is disgusting for me.”
James and his brother, Lee Coates, said they felt “abandoned and overwhelmed” that they were not fully informed about what had happened to their father and that they were an “afterthought” when vigils were arranged in the city.
