Image source, Nottinghamshire Police

Valdo Calocane, who is now 34, is currently serving a hospital order in a high-security facility after pleading guilty to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and to three counts of attempted murder.

He was born in Guinea-Bissau on 4 September 1991.

His family moved to Madeira when he was about three years old, and then to Lisbon in Portugal when he was about eight years old.

He and his family came to the UK in 2007 when he was 16 years old.

When he started to become unwell in 2020, Valdo - whose family live in Wales - was studying mechanical engineering and living in Nottingham.

In May 2020, Valdo called his family at various points "sounding agitated and crying", the inquiry heard.

Celeste said there was a lot of news about sadness and death at the time, and that before the pandemic, Valdo spent a lot of time in the library studying.

She said in her statement to the inquiry that Valdo just wanted to hear the family's voices.

She wrote: "And if we stopped talking, he'd ask us to keep talking. In hindsight, I think it was an attempt by him to hear something other than the voices in his head."

However, at that point, Valdo had not told them about the voices, Celeste said.

Celeste was asked what it was like working in a hospital as a nurse during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She replied: "It was just like beyond anything you could imagine, because every day you go in thinking you have to do your job but at the same time you're thinking - your job may be something that is your life or death."

Celeste said she would care for patients and return home to her family not knowing what the outcome would be.

"Every day you put on a brave face and have to do it and have to get on with it, and it wasn't easy," she said.

Celeste told the inquiry she felt Valdo was perhaps talking more with his younger brother Elias, who was also living away from home as a graduate at the time, about his mental health.

"I thought Elias would be able to reassure him," she said. "I was working in a hospital so it was a stressful time.

"Because they're quite close, if Valdo has some worries, they will talk between them as brothers.

"I get a lot of anxiety, they would say, 'there's no point telling mum that'."

Image source, The Nottingham Inquiry

Celeste said she was close with her son growing up, as a younger mother.

"We were really close, we talked about everything," she said.

But she added: "If something he knows is going to worry me, because I get worried quite a lot, he wouldn't tell me.

"He protected me."

Celeste Calocane has taken the stand, and Rachel Langdale KC - counsel to the inquiry - is asking about when Celeste was first concerned over her son's mental health.

Celeste said the first signs were in 2020, when Valdo was away studying in Nottingham.

She said: "I was worried because he was anxious. What was going on around the world, it was a hard time, it was the pandemic and he was far from us in Nottingham in university.

"I video-called him, maybe I didn't do a video call with him before, and he said 'don't call me like this', and hung up.

"I left it, he called me back and apologised, and we moved on."

She added: "He said strange things were happening in his flat but he didn't want to tell me what it was, so I thought it's fine, nothing serious, so I just left it."

Today will not be the first evidence to be heard from a relative of Nottingham attacks killer Valdo Calocane.

Yesterday, his younger brother Elias spoke to the inquiry and said he feared Valdo was going to take his own life.

Elias had received a number of messages from Calocane, expressing thoughts of violence and "red rum" - a reference to murder - in 2020.

The inquiry has previously heard these messages were compiled by Elias and handed to doctors in charge of Valdo's care during his first admission to hospital in May 2020.

On Wednesday, Elias told the Nottingham Inquiry he believed his brother's messages were about harming himself, and said he felt "powerless" when it came to his brother's mental health.

Valdo had called Elias on 13 June 2023, telling Elias to take the family out of the country. Elias did not know that by then, his brother had already killed Barnaby and Grace.

The families of the bereaved shook their heads in disagreement throughout Elias's evidence.

During a heated exchange with the bereaved families' lawyer, Tim Moloney KC, Elias said he understood Moloney had been instructed to "essentially bully my family" - a remark that angered the victims' families.

Today, Valdo Calocane's mother Celeste will be giving evidence to the inquiry.

We've heard in the inquiry about various interactions Celeste had with mental health services in Nottingham throughout Valdo's care.

In 2024, Celeste told the BBC mental health services had "washed their hands" of her son's care, when they discharged him back to his GP nine months before the attacks.

She and her younger son Elias - who gave evidence on Wednesday - had called for a public inquiry, saying the mental health system was "broken" and led to a "tragedy that could have been prevented".

In that same interview in 2024, Valdo's family said they had no signs of his mental illness as a teenager or young man.

Celeste is the only witness listed to give evidence today.

On 13 June 2023, Valdo Calocane - who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020 - stabbed to death 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar as they were walking home from a night out.

He then walked across the city and about an hour later, fatally stabbed grandfather Ian Coates, 65, as he was on his way to work.

Image source, Supplied

Calocane took Ian's van and drove it into the city centre, where he struck Wayne Birkett, Sharon Miller and Marcin Gawronski.

They survived Calocane's attacks but were left with life-changing injuries.

In January 2024, Calocane was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order after pleading guilty to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and to three counts of attempted murder.

The families affected have never been happy with that outcome.

Good morning and welcome to day 44 of evidence from the Nottingham Inquiry, external. The public inquiry is examining the killings of Barnaby Webber, Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham on 13 June 2023.