The mother of a schoolboy murdered by a teenager he met online has criticised a police and crime commissioner for suggesting that cutbacks were to blame for the police’s failure to act on her warnings about her son’s killer.
Computer engineer Lewis Daynes, 19, was jailed for life last week after admitting killing Breck Bednar, 14, from Caterham in Surrey having lured him to his flat in Grays, Essex. Serious questions have been raised about how the police handled the case after it emerged that Daynes was arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault three years before he attacked Breck, and that Breck’s family warned police about Daynes before the murder.
Breck’s mother, Lorin LaFave, who made a 30-minute phonecall to Surrey police two months before the killing, detailing her concerns about Daynes, has complained to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) about how Surrey and Essex police handled the case.
LaFave said that after the murder the family was told of previous allegations against Daynes, but until last week she had not been told that those allegations had been entered on to the Police National Database and would have been available to Surrey police when she raised concerns about Daynes.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme LaFave said: “Essex [police] wanted to make it clear that they had actually put [the allegations against Daynes] on to the system. But my question then is why was Daynes never properly prosecuted?”
Kevin Hurley, PCC for Surrey, said he could not discuss the specifics of the case while it was being investigated by the IPCC, but suggested cuts to the police budget were to blame for Surrey police’s failure to act on LeFave’s warnings about Daynes.
“We have major problems with staff retention and staff training as a result of cutbacks in expenditure,” Hurley told the BBC. “Therefore we may or may not have adequate numbers of people dealing with each call. When we you face cuts and staff training problems, as we do at the moment, one can never be certain that there will not be human error.”
LaFave was exasperated by Hurley’s explanation. “I just find that so unacceptable when I sat there and gave so many examples ... when I’m worried that he’s a paedophile, it should click, it shouldn’t just be ignored. It is not acceptable to say ‘we don’t have enough funding and training’. Somebody needs to explain how this happened ... I have enough information to know that people did not do their job in this case.”
Asked about the fact the Essex police had recorded allegations about Daynes on the database, LaFave said: “It’s just another blow. Every day is hard enough, then you receive a piece of information like this – that it was on the system and easily accessible and it wasn’t even attempted to find out whether this person was safe or not, after I had given details of his name, his age, the county where he lived and all of the grooming techniques he was using on Breck and the other boys. It is just appalling to find out that this information was in the system and went unawares.”
She added: “Unfortunately I rang the non-emergency number and I’m now thinking why did I bother to do that, because I feel like I got non-action. It goes through to Surrey, because that’s where I live. I didn’t think to call Essex because I called a generic non-emergency number. It was 17 December, two months before Breck was murdered. Breck was being pulled and controlled and manipulated so much that his personality was changing to an extreme level.
“I could see that Daynes was completely controlling and grooming him, so I called the police and spent 30 minutes speaking about my concerns and told them Daynes’s name and alias he used and I gave where he had lived and where he said he lived. And it was enough information for them to find out who this person was.”
