Charlie Webber brother of Nottingham assault sufferer Barnaby speaks out

Last summer, Charlie Webber was on a beach in Devon enjoying a Combined Cadet Force weekend with schoolfriends. He remembers everyone swapping banter about their families, and Charlie, now 16, was talking about his ‘brilliant’ and ‘sporty’ older brother, Barney.

‘I was laughing about a paddleboarding birthday party I had when I was younger when none of us could get Barney off the board,’ says Charlie. 

‘That was literally ten minutes before my teacher came over and told me I had to go home.

‘I hadn’t done anything wrong for once, so I knew something was up and guessed it was family related.’

His guess was correct. Waiting for him, in the car park, were his parents, David and Emma, both of them visibly upset. And Barney wasn’t with them.

‘I didn’t know what, but I knew it had probably happened to him,’ says Charlie.

Exactly what had happened was unfathomable. 

Barney, 19, and his close friend Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both undergraduates finishing their first year at Nottingham University, had been stabbed to death in a vicious, senseless attack as they walked back to their halls after a night out in the early hours of that morning.

Barney’s mother Emma, 52, described to me in an exclusive interview earlier this year, this exact moment, in the car park, with Charlie.

She described seeing ‘my poor boy looking so worried, and thinking, ‘I’m going to destroy your life now with what I have to tell you’.’

She sobbed as she spoke about it, but was determined to carry on ‘for Barney’s and Charlie’s sake’.

Charlie doesn’t cry but his suffering is writ large. Barney, he tells me, was never a ‘victim’ before that terrible morning. He was ‘basically the second part of me’ and ‘such a strong person’.

‘I didn’t believe my parents at first, when they told me,’ he says. ‘I was like, ‘What sort of cruel joke is this? Barney can’t be dead’.’

‘People say, ‘I can’t believe it’, but you actually can’t. I remember coming home afterwards and being stood at the front door. I just couldn’t take the next step. I couldn’t step through the door.’

‘When we got in Dad went upstairs and shut Barney’s door. No one could bear to go in his room because it was as he’d left it.’

This weekend Charlie is with friends in London celebrating the end of his GCSEs. Barney’s room in the family’s warm, vibrant home in Taunton, Somerset, remains much as it was on that June 13 day a year ago. His parents want to keep it that way.

Charlie tells me he wears some of his brother’s T-shirts and has his cricket bat ‘but I don’t use it, not because I don’t want to but because he’s smaller than me so I can’t use it’. So it remains yet another part of Barney, frozen in time.

We’re here in a comfy outdoor cabin, where Charlie has space from the family house to kick back with friends, for this, his first in-depth interview about the brother he pretty much hero-worshipped for the best part of his life.

He’s doing it, he says, because ‘I just want to remember him. I want everyone to remember him. I don’t want to forget how he sounds and how he looks.

‘I feel sorry for anyone who didn’t know him because he was such an incredible person. I don’t even say that because he was my brother. He was just a very, very, very good person.’

On July 4, Charlie’s family is hosting an evening at Taunton School to remember Barney and raise funds for The Barnaby Webber Foundation charity as they continue to fight for justice.

His killer, the monstrous Valdo Calocane, who had a long history of serious mental health problems and a warrant out for his arrest at the time of his violent rampage, was given a hospital order after pleading guilty to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility owing to paranoid schizophrenia, as well as three counts of attempted murder.

In May, the Court of Appeal rejected an application to increase his sentence to include jail time. Barney’s family, along with Grace’s family, the Kumars, and that of his third victim, caretaker Ian Coates, still feel little but rage.

They blame the outcome on ‘a weak investigation and prosecution, over-reliance upon doctors’ evidence and archaic out-of-date laws’ that have meant Calocane receives ‘no punishment’ for his heinous acts.

‘We recognise his previous diagnosis of mental illness, however, we maintain that he knew what he was doing, he knew it was wrong, but he did it anyway. And therefore, he is a murderer,’ they said in a joint statement on the anniversary of the brutal killings.

They are now demanding a public inquiry and will leave ‘no stone unturned’ to ensure ‘the failures of Leicestershire police, Nottinghamshire police, Nottingham Healthcare NHS foundation trust (among others) are exposed and accounted for’.

Charlie tells me while he’d like to see Calocane ‘get what he deserves which is [a conviction for] murder’, more than anything he wants ‘peace’.

‘We’ve been fighting for so long. My parents, the Kumars and the Coates have been unbelievably strong but, for me, I just want everything to go quiet again. In a way, I want everything to go back to the way it was before.’ 

But, of course, he knows, as everyone knows, he can’t have that.

‘This could all have been avoided very, very easily. When you’re growing up you believe the police can’t fail — that they always do things perfectly, but …’

He crosses his arms. ‘Can you believe those messages?’ he asks. He’s referring to the disgusting police WhatsApp messages, sent in the aftermath of the attack, in which a police officer described Barney and Grace as ‘proper butchered’ and said officers ‘tried to hold their inners in’, and which were shared by another officer.

It led to the two of them being reprimanded, but not sacked, over the grotesquely insensitive act.

‘That was the one thing in this that has made me properly livid.’ His eyes cloud with pain and you can’t help but want to weep for all he has endured.

‘When I saw him [Calocane] in court I hadn’t known what to expect. I’d always had thoughts in my head about what I’d do if I came face-to-face with him. ‘I’d imagined a monster — someone who wasn’t even human — but when I did see him, it was very anticlimactic. He was just a normal man. Not normal on the inside — on the inside he’s evil — but on the outside he was just an ordinary man.

‘Everyone says how angry it [the sentencing] makes them. But even if they’d given him a million life sentences it doesn’t help my family at all. No amount of justice can rectify what’s happened. We’ve still lost Barney.’

Charlie last saw his brother at the beginning of last June when he returned to university for a cricket match. ‘A couple of weeks before the incidents in Nottingham I stayed the night with him up there. We went to watch World’s Strongest Man and had brunch. It was really nice. On the way back I went [to Taunton] in Barney’s car rather than with my parents.’ Barney had talked about Grace, Charlie remembers, describing her as ‘lovely’ and ‘really kind’.

‘That was one of the last conversations I had with him because when he’s back here he’s not home much. He’s always out playing cricket and stuff,’ says Charlie, slipping poignantly into the present tense, without realising.

‘So, I’ll always remember that conversation and that whole journey back. That was the first time I’d really spoken to him maturely, one-to-one, not as brother to brother. Like proper conversation.’

The day after the killings the family and, what Charlie describes as their ‘shield’ of many friends, went to Nottingham for an emotional vigil at the university campus. Grace’s father Sanjoy and David spoke to those gathered.

Few of us who watched and heard their generous words of love could help but be humbled by those devastated but dignified fathers as they stood together united in grief.

‘I’d argue that was the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life, sitting there and seeing pictures and flowers for my brother,’ says Charlie. ‘I remember just crying the entire time.’

As with so many of us who lose someone dear, Charlie yearns for some sort of sign his brother is with him still.

‘On the [family] calendar we’ve gone from four names to three but, even though it says that, there are definitely still four of us. It’s just one of us isn’t here right now. Like my mum says, he’s definitely here in spirit.

‘There was a very weird incident when we had our first memorial cricket match. Me and Barney’s really good mate Ed were batting together. The number on Barney’s shirt at uni was 53 and, completely by accident — it’s just crazy or, I don’t know, chance — we got exactly 53 in our batting partnership.

‘I remember worrying before, ‘Where is he? Am I ever going to see him again?’ I think that was, kind of, his goodbye to me — a final message. I thought it was incredible. I was just in tears.

‘I try to pray as often as I can now. Before everything happened, I didn’t really know what I believed in but I’ve definitely become more religious. In my head it’s like if I pray for him maybe he’ll have some peace in the afterlife. I couldn’t accept the fact he’s just gone.

‘It sounds awful but I’m much less worried about dying now. I was saying to my friend, I don’t want to die at all — I want to live — but a small part of me says, ‘If I die there’s a chance I’ll be with him again’.’

In truth, there are few 16-year-olds with as much of a zest for life as Charlie, but his brother’s cruel death has turned everything in this close, loving family on its head.

‘As I was growing up, I had such a wonderful first 15 years of life,’ he says. ‘We all feel robbed and stripped by something that never should have happened. I wouldn’t say I’ve lost a bit of my family, I’ve lost almost all my family. None of us are quite the same people they were before.

‘You’re doing things that were unimaginable a few months before, like waking up on the morning of my brother’s funeral and thinking, ‘Do I really have my brother’s funeral today? He was only 19′.’

Barney’s funeral was held on July 14 at Taunton Minster which seated 600, but screens still had to be erected outside for 400 more to pay their respects. Charlie, who was then only 15, gave a eulogy.

‘I remember going up there and my leg was shaking because I was so petrified of saying something wrong with the cameras filming. I wrote it the night before in about half an hour and said he was like my armour, in a kind of way, because he always protected me.

‘That moment, when I actually said it out loud, I felt like it was actually happening, that I had to go on for the next however many years without him.

‘My parents were in pain too and I was trying to help them as much as I could. I thought I had a duty — as the eldest — to take care of people like Barney did. I tried my best but it was hard trying to handle other people’s grief while I was grieving myself. ‘

Charlie began therapy. ‘I had a great therapist. I don’t think I’d be able to cope at all if I hadn’t had her when I did. I remember feeling guilty before then if I laughed or felt happy or felt any form of joy at all. How could I laugh when my brother can’t do anything any more? I’ve lost him for ever. How selfish am I to feel any form of happiness?

‘My therapist told me to laugh; that I can’t just become a shell because of what’s happened. That’s not what Barney would want. She encouraged me to do the things I loved — play rugby and cricket, see my friends.

‘She kept it very simple which was odd because at the time I was so overwhelmed with everything that was going on. I think that’s what pulled me through.’

Today, the huge hole Barney has left in Charlie’s life remains but it is, he says, ‘gradually getting easier day by day’.

‘If I’m cooped up at home for too long I don’t cope very well so that’s why I play so much sport and go and see my friends a lot. I try to get away from Taunton sometimes because there’s lots of memories here. Sometimes I’ll just be walking through town and I’ll see a shop we’ve been in together and that sets me off a little bit.

‘But I have so many friends around me — Barney’s friends too — and there’s so much to look forward to. The other day we had our second memorial cricket match and there’s the tribute evening on the fourth.

‘Barney would really enjoy those days, although I think his ego would be through the roof.’

T here’s a flash of laughter. It’s good to see. He falls silent for a moment. ‘Anyone who has a sibling hold them tight. In the blink of an eye you could lose them. No matter how many arguments you have with them, they’re probably going to be the most important thing in your life.

‘People ask me what I’d say to him if I could speak to him. I’d tell him I love him and how much he changed me and helped me through my life. He’s the reason I am who I am.

‘I don’t want him to be forgotten. My kids aren’t going to have him as an uncle. I’m not going to have his kids as nephews or nieces, but there will be, what my parents call, a new normal.

‘My children will hear stories of their uncle and how amazing he was. They’ll probably think he’s a superhero.’ Again he laughs.

‘I’ll always talk about him — never forget him. None of us will. And no one can take that away.’