Schizophrenic who knifed mum seven times had been out of jail less than a week
A SCHIZOPHRENIC knifeman who slashed a mother pushing a pram six days after being released from jail pleaded guilty to attempted murder yesterday.
The attack by Mark Brazant, 44, could have been prevented were it not for a series of blunders by healthcare and prison bosses, it emerged.
Brazant ambushed Josephine Conlon from behind, stabbing her in the face and neck seven times with a kitchen knife.
Mrs Conlon, 36, a marketing manager for McDonald’s, feared she would be raped during the attack last December and was left with wounds to her left eye, right cheek and neck.
Brazant had previously denied meaning to seriously injure the mother of three, but at the Old Bailey yesterday he admitted attempting to murder her in Streatham Hill, south London.
Six days before the brutal stabbing, Brazant had finished an eight-week jail term for attacking four women in November.
Brazant, who also had a previous conviction for carrying a blade, had been due to be picked up outside HMP Thameside, in south-east London, by a healthcare worker from the West London NHS Trust to be taken by taxi to a home in Ealing, west London, run by Enriched Care.
But nobody arrived and he was allowed to leave the jail unmonitored, with just a freedom travel pass and a week’s supply of antipsychotic drug denzapine.
Enriched Care team leader Ben Omullo, who runs the home for five patients, told the hearing he had reported Brazant as missing when he did not arrive there on Christmas Eve.
Brazant had previously disappeared from the home ‘several times’ and accepted his mental state would often vary wildly, he told the court. There were also concerns he was not sticking to his strict medication regime.
Instead Brazant, who was on a 12-month licence, travelled to a probation centre in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, he had been directed to by prison staff.
But when he arrived, he was told there was no record for him and he was sent away. It was later discovered he should have been sent to a different office.
Brazant was not seen again until he attacked Mrs Conlon. On the day of the attack, he boarded a bus in south London before hearing voices in his head which told him to get off and stab someone, Brazant said.
CCTV footage shows him cross paths with Mrs Conlon before deciding to follow her.
‘I remember walking up the road seeing the victim pass me. I was thinking this was someone I could “do”,’ he said. ‘I pulled her and stabbed her. She said to me, “What have I done to you?”’
Mrs Conlon had been walking back from a bakery with her 21month-old daughter when she was shoved into a driveway and repeatedly stabbed.
Supported throughout the hearing by her husband Greg, she said: ‘I remember thinking he had pushed me into the driveway because he was going to rape me. Then he didn’t, he just started hitting me.
‘I realised I was being stabbed. I was screaming a lot because I was not in the road so I wanted somebody to hear me.’
When she stood up, Brazant ran off. Neighbours came to her aid before medics arrived.
Brazant spent 48 hours on the loose before handing himself to a police station on January 2. He will be sentenced next month.
A West London NHS Trust spokesman said there had been a cross-agency investigation into why Brazant had not been collected from jail. The Prison Service has yet to make a comment.
‘Left to wander unmonitored’