The father of a 7-year-old girl who was stabbed to death by a complete stranger—an illegal immigrant from Albania who was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia—has criticised the Home Office for failing to deport her before she committed the crime.
On Monday a coroner said Emily Jones’s death at the hands of 33-year-old Eltiona Skana could never have been predicted, but the head of a charity that deals with victims of mental health homicide has said that was “absolute nonsense.”
Skana was sitting on a bench in Queen’s Park, Bolton, on March 22, 2020—which happened to be Mother’s Day—when Jones rode past on her scooter.
She got up and slashed Jones with a craft knife, calling out, “Mummy, Mummy!” to the girl’s mother.
Skana went on trial for murder in December 2020 but the trial collapsed and she was detained indefinitely at Rampton Hospital in Nottinghamshire.
After an inquest, Timothy Brennand, the senior coroner for Manchester West, said Jones “may well feel and is entitled to feel” Skana should never have been allowed into the United Kingdom.
Coroner Describes Care as ‘Sub-Optimal’
Brennand said Skana had suffered from “sub-optimal” care from local mental health teams but he said the system was “in crisis” and he said he would be writing a Prevention of Future Death (PFD) report and sending it to the Department of Health and Social Care.Skana—who was described at the eight-day inquest as a “psychotic ticking time bomb”—came to Britain in the back of a lorry from France in 2014 and was given asylum despite admitting to lying about being a victim of sexual exploitation.
Jones’s father, Mark Jones, refused to attend the remainder of the inquest after an expert witness referred to her as “being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
His solicitor, Sefton Kwasnik, said Jones felt it was tantamount to “victim blaming.”
After the inquest, Kwasnik said: “Mark said, in his own statement, that if the Home Office had done their job properly Miss Skana wouldn’t have been here in the first place.”
He added: “She twice told doctors that she lied in her asylum application, she twice told doctors and police that she wanted to go home, in 2015 and 2017.”
Kwasnik said: “The Home Office offered no explanation as to why they ignored those important clues in her presentation.”
‘Killing Certainly Could Have Been Prevented’
Julian Hendy, founder of the Hundredfamilies charity, which has been supporting Jones’s family, told The Epoch Times: “The coroner hasn’t gone far enough. Emily’s killing certainly could have been prevented had mental health services monitored and supervised Skana properly.”He said: “It was abundantly clear that Eltiona Skana had a well-recorded history of paranoid schizophrenia, serious violence against others, including with knives, and became unwell when she wasn’t taking her medication.”
“That was all well known before she killed Emily. It didn’t only become apparent with hindsight, as the coroner appeared to suggest,” added Hendy, whose own father, Philip, was killed in Bristol in 2007 by a man with a long history of mental health problems.
Brennand said in the past Skana might have been kept “under lock and key” but nowadays it is left to community mental health teams to provide “snapshot” risk assessments.
He pointed out Skana had only been seen once by her mental health worker in the 100 days before the attack.
Brennand said he had “profound concerns” about the “morale, workloads, training, staff shortages, recruitment, inability to deliver continuing care, record keeping, quantity and quality of face-to-face consultations” in community mental health.
Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust said a review found Jones’s killing could not have been foreseen.
But Hendy said: “Eltiona Skana was insufficiently monitored and supervised by mental health services, they knew she could become dangerous when unmedicated and unwell.”
“She was supposed to be intensively monitored by mental health services, but we discovered she went weeks without any prescriptions for her anti-psychotic medication. And nobody checked,” he added.
He told The Epoch Times: “Brief visits of just 10 to 15 minutes a month are simply not enough to tell if patients with a history of violence are well, stable, and taking their medication.”
Hendy said it also emerged during the inquest that Skana’s medication—which had been delivered by regular injection by medical professionals—had been switched to tablets, which she stopped taking.
100 Homicides a Year Linked to Serious Mental Illness
Hendy, who keeps track of cases as they go through the courts, said there are between 600 and 700 homicides a year in Britain and around 100–120 of them are by people with serious mental illness.Skana—who admitted to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility—was sentenced to life imprisonment and was given a minimum term of 10 years and eight months.
The Epoch Times contacted the Home Office, which said it was unable to comment on Skana’s case.
