Victims’ mothers say recommendations will not secure real change after Zephaniah McLeod’s deadly attacks in 2020

Jo Billington can vividly remember the moment police came to her home in Crosby, Liverpool, at 5am on 6 September 2020. They told her that her 23-year-old son, Jacob, had been killed in Birmingham, where he had been on a night out with his friends.

“They left saying ‘we don’t know anything about the incident, we just know Jacob has passed away. It’s all in the news’,” she said. “They gave me a non-emergency number to call but after an hour of trying to get through I rang 999 and said to the call handler: ‘I’ve just been told my son has been killed in Birmingham, can somebody help me?’ It was pretty grim.”