"Prosecutor Alan Kent QC said the teenager was "lucky" to survive after the blade was completely buried in his head with the tip poking out the other side."
Two weeks later, Norman followed Mr Else off a bus, then attacked him, stabbing Mr Else 200 times. Norman, who has been confined indefinitely to hospital treatment (hopefully), said that he felt no remorse for his deeds, or sympathy for Mr Else's family, because voices in his head were urging him on to kill:
"He told officers: "It is just my madness, it is just like how my mind is.... I know I could do that again. It is not a big thing for me to do ... I wanted him to die so much I just kept on stabbing him until he was dead".
Like other offenders of this type, it seems that Norman had stopped taking medication for his condition:
"The court was told that Norman attacked the teenager and Mr Else after he stopped taking his medication and claimed it made him impotent."
The judge who sentenced Norman said that Andrew Else was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as I can discover, no-one is being held to account for letting such an obviously dangerous man like Norman out on the streets in the first place.
I happened upon this story by accident. It is on the BBC London news section of their website, but has been given no great prominence. I find this alarming, not only because of the horrific nature of this killing, but because of the serious implications of failure in our mental health system. It raises the same questions that occurred to me when I wrote, in 2013, about the Nicola Edgington murder. Put simply, the questions are: How many murders are committed by released mental health patients? Why is it happening? Who is responsible?
For answers, I turn to the "Hundred Families" website, so called because, as it says on its Home Page:
"Around a 100 families a year will have a loved one killed by someone with mental illness."
The evidence for this is overwhelming; the website lists all known killings by mental health patients going back into the 1990s. In London alone, there were 272 known cases between 1993 and 2014; in the North West of England, during that period, there were 129 known cases. It is important to stress "known cases", as, in many murder and assault cases, the mental health problems of the perpetrators are not mentioned.
Julian Hendy, who runs the website, and whose own father was murdered in the street by a man with mental health problems, argues that this is happening because:
"Three and a half years after the brutal murder of our mother we now know the truth leading up to that tragic events on Friday 13th May 2011.
The Health Inspectorate of Wales report has highlighted a number of significant basic medical best practice failures. These failings are far worse than we had imagined.
We are shocked to learn that the clearly prejudicial views of the medical staff severely compromised the diagnosis and therefore subsequent treatment of Deyan Deyanov.
Had Betsi Cadwaladr recognised that Deyan Deyanov was a young man with very serious mental health problems then our mother would still be alive today."
Now, it can be argued that mental health diagnosis is very difficult, and it is not always possible to judge the future actions of such patients upon release. This may be true, but the fact remains that there are far too many of these murders. So far, released mental health patients have killed more British citizens in the past 20 years than have Jihadi terrorists and the IRA.
To conclude, I would like to express my sympathy to the relatives of all such murder victims as described here. In particular, I send my condolences to the family of Andrew Else, whose horrific death was not thought of sufficient interest to be included on the national news. How sad it is, that the murder of a victim of some faceless person's decision to set at liberty a murderous schizophrenic should be thought of as being purely of local interest.
