FAMILY OF SCHIZOPHRENIC MAN WHO BATTERED DAD TO DEATH SLAM NHS
Former plumber Richard Thorpe, 26, violently battered Jehovah’s Witness dad Eddie, 58, in front of his distraught brother and sister with a heavy pipe-bending tool.Psychotic Richard had dreamed up the innocent father was a paedophile who had sexually abused him as a child.
He was indefinitely detained in a mental home for the protection of the public by Leeds Crown Court.
He then stamped on his father until he was dead.
After his hearing, sister Melissa Thorpe, 28, brother Robert, 23, and mum Pauline, 57, welcomed the sentence, but launched a scathing attack on the care system.
They demanded to know why he was “left to rot” in a community care home with health workers failing to check on him.
Melissa said: “I have been living in fear in my own home, where Robert and I lived with our father, about what Richard might do to someone.
“My brother is only now getting the care and treatment he so desperately needed and should have got before.
“It has taken the horrendous death of my father to get to this point and that is not acceptable.” Melissa told how she worried for her father’s safety after his relationship with troubled son Richard became strained when fights about religion erupted at the family home.
The family eventually decided to move volatile Richard into care in the community after his mental illness took hold in 2003 and he became increasingly agitated and violent towards his devout father.
Melissa said: “He was confused.
It was like he was torn between wanting to please dad but not knowing how he felt about his religion.
It really messed him up and it was a massive part of his problem.” The family are now demanding to know why their ill brother was not officially diagnosed with schizophrenia until after dad Eddie’s brutal death.
Supermarket worker Robert, who witnessed his sibling delivering the final stamps to his father’s head, said: “He was assigned a CPN (Community Psychiatric Nurse), but she wouldn’t take him seriously and said that he just wasn’t trying.
“She was supposed to pay him regular visits, but she eventually stopped going.
“She even told my mum that she didn’t think she was right for the job and, when she left, she didn’t even assign anyone else to my brother.
“He stopped washing.
He would wet himself in bed and his room was a state.
“It left him vulnerable and we know the other patients would bully him.
“They tricked him into giving his money away and completely took advantage of him.”
