Jonty Bravery threw a six-year-old boy from a 10th floor viewing platform at London’s Tate Modern.
image copyrightMet Police
The teenager who threw a boy from the 10th floor of London’s Tate Modern causing life-changing injuries had a history of violent behaviour.
A serious case review found that Jonty Bravery, who is autistic, had expressed a desire to hurt people prior to the attack on the six-year-old in 2019.
He also had a personality disorder that had not been diagnosed and this was the explanation for the offence, it found.
The review calls for “critical lessons” to be “translated into action”.
Professionals failed to distinguish between behaviours linked to his autism and callous, premeditated traits, the report says.
It highlights a series of troubling incidents involving Bravery in the two years before the attack, including threatening to kill members of the public and putting faeces in his mother’s make-up brushes.
But his violent behaviour had been less frequent in the period before the Tate Modern attack, while he was living in a placement with two-to-one care funded by Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council and the NHS clinical commissioning group (CCG).
image copyrightPA Media
The report says: “There was no recent evidence that he presented a risk to other children or adults unknown to him.
“It was in this context that he was progressively given more freedoms, which saw him able to visit central London unaccompanied on the day of the incident.”
On 4 August 2019, Bravery made his way to the Tate Modern’s viewing balcony where CCTV footage showed him following young children and looking over railings.
He then threw the six-year-old from the viewing platform and he fell 100ft (30m), suffering a bleed to the brain, and other injuries, including fractures to his spine.
Bravery, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of five, was jailed for 15 years in June for attempted murder.
The review, by the Local Safeguarding Children Partnership (LSCP), highlights a national shortage of specialist and residential community care for children and young people with complex and high-risk behaviours.
Bravery spent various periods of time being moved from psychiatric intensive care units, specialist residential schools and hotels from the age of 15 as his behaviour became more troubling.
image copyrightStuart Haggas
His parents thought this detrimental to his mental health, the report says.
His father told the review he felt “frustrated” at the apparent lack of expertise among private care providers dealing with his son.
During a four-week placement in a children’s home in 2017, Bravery hit a climbing wall instructor at a leisure centre, deliberately damaged a car and assaulted a member of staff with a brick.
Later that year, he dragged a member of staff along the floor by her hair and, in 2018, he disclosed he was planning to kill his stepmother and sister.
The review says: “It is evident that professionals working with (Bravery) at this time did not think he would act on these statements, which were seen as attention-seeking behaviour.
“This was because all of (Bravery’s) actions were viewed as products of his autistic behaviour and there was no consideration of these threats in a context of conduct disorder.”
image copyrightAFP
A psychiatric report in 2018 said Bravery, who is now 19, had learnt to use his autism as an excuse to evade responsibility for dangerous behaviour.
The review says Bravery needed residential therapeutic solutions that could enable him, as an autistic young person, to engage in a treatment regime for his conduct disorder.
“But such a residential option did not exist,” it adds.
The LCSP says it is continuing to make improvements across police, health and social care in the delivery and co-ordination of support for autistic children and those with complex high-risk behaviours.
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