Broadmoor's worst inmate Jonty Bravery: 7 staff to restrain him. Horrifying 'tombstoning'. Brutal attacks in padded cell. As he's convicted for attacking nurses, the Mail reveals battle to contain his rage | Retrui News | Retrui
Broadmoor's worst inmate Jonty Bravery: 7 staff to restrain him. Horrifying 'tombstoning'. Brutal attacks in padded cell. As he's convicted for attacking nurses, the Mail reveals battle to contain his rage
SOURCE:Daily Mail
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Jonty Bravery is kept under supervision. At all times, three staff members are on hand outside the secure room in which he is held at Broadmoor Hospital.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Jonty Bravery is kept under supervision. At all times, three staff members are on hand outside the secure room in which he is held at Broadmoor Hospital.
Should the 24-year-old need to be escorted around the facility, four more are drafted in as back up.
But the need for such extreme caution is warranted.
Bravery was locked up for life in 2020 after he hurled a six-year-old French boy from a viewing platform on the tenth floor of Tate Modern in 2019, a crime so callous it shocked the nation.
Having grabbed the boy as he ran ahead of his parents at the art gallery in London, Bravery scooped him up and over the rail before smiling and laughing.
But he is also a danger to himself, and for that reason his room is almost entirely empty.
Painted white but for one green wall, there’s a single mattress, a window and an en-suite toilet. There are no fixtures or fittings that can be used to tie a ligature.
Not that Bravery hasn’t tried to harm himself.
Even though it remains firmly closed, on more than one occasion he has hauled himself up on to the window’s narrow, internal sill and then thrown himself off, ‘tombstoning’ himself head-first on to the floor of the room.
It was as he attempted such a manoeuvre in September last year that staff at the high-security hospital intervened – to their cost.
Police mugshot of Jonty Bravery after his arrest for hurling a child from the tenth floor of the Tate Modern
Bravery appearing in court at the Old Bailey via videolink from Broadmoor Hospital for his sentence hearing in 2020 - he was jailed for at least 15 years
As they struggled to control him, Bravery attacked two female nurses, clawing at the face and eyes of one and leaving the other bruised and fearing for her life.
Despite then refusing to attend court on the grounds that it would interfere with his ‘therapy’, last week he was convicted of two counts of assault.
It is not the first time that Bravery, who has been diagnosed with autism and a personality disorder, has attacked staff. And the continuing threat he clearly poses means it is anyone’s guess as to how long he will require such intensive monitoring.
‘We have murderers, arsonists and some very violent people here – paranoid schizophrenics, psychotics and genuine psychopaths as well,’ a source at Broadmoor told the Daily Mail.
‘Bravery’s behaviour and his mental-health condition means that he is extremely unpredictable. And when you are dealing with very unpredictable patients you have to use what is called “relational security” – basically you have to get inside their heads so you can see the warning signs.
‘This is crucial for your own personal safety. The warning signs might be something as simple as a patient making a minor observation about the taste of a drug.
‘But over a period of a few days that can then escalate to the same patient becoming convinced that you are trying to poison him so he refuses his medication.
‘The real worry for us is the unpredictability of the patients – they are in a secure hospital for a reason and you can never, ever let your guard slip.’
The Daily Mail can reveal that Bravery was, in fact, only moved to Broadmoor, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, two years ago.
He was originally sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 15 years in 2020 for attempted murder. His young victim miraculously survived the 100ft fall, but required months in intensive care having received life-changing injuries that, as we shall see, he has battled to overcome.
Bravery began his sentence in HMP Belmarsh, a category-A jail in south-east London, where he was said to have settled in well.
But in 2023 doctors decided he needed hospital treatment, applying for him to be moved to Broadmoor under the Mental Health Act.
One of three such psychiatric hospitals in the country, those treated at Broadmoor in the past have included Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and gangland boss Ronnie Kray.
More recently, having moved into purpose-built accommodation on a new site in 2019, the hospital has housed sexual predator Koci Selamaj.
Selamaj murdered primary school teacher Sabina Nessa in 2021 and was transferred there after stabbing a guard at HMP Frankland in County Durham.
While Bravery could be moved back into a mainstream prison to serve out his remaining sentence, the psychiatrists treating him at Broadmoor would first have to rule that he was ‘fit’ to be returned.
But knowing how best to contain and care for Bravery goes to the heart of the problem he has posed ever since his behaviour became problematic as a child.
Born in west London, he was raised in a £1.8million, four-bedroom house in Parsons Green. By the time he turned three his parents had separated and started new families.
He was diagnosed as autistic aged five, and his dad, the director of a printing firm, campaigned passionately for more help for children with the condition.
But one teacher who taught the boy at primary school recalled that even then he was like ‘a loaded grenade’.
‘Jonty would make unprovoked attacks on other children, kicking, punching and scratching, from a very young age,’ she said. ‘I told a friend when he was seven he’d become either a sex pest or a murderer. He was menacing.’
At the same time he developed ‘extreme jealousy’ towards his half-sisters, twins born in 2006 to his father and his new partner.
As Bravery grew older and physically stronger, so he became more of a challenge, even contaminating his mother’s make-up brushes with faeces.
As a young teenager he was hospitalised twice, once for purposefully ingesting paint in an art lesson. He was later sectioned and treated at a psychiatric intensive care unit in northern England.
Aged 16, a stay at a residential school ended with him attacking a fellow pupil after losing at ten-pin bowling. At a specialist children’s home he assaulted a member of staff with a brick.
Despite these incidents, by 2019 he was living semi-independently in a residential flat in Northolt, west London. He was the responsibility of Hammersmith and Fulham social services – and was assigned six full-time carers.
But as one carer previously told the Daily Mail, conniving Bravery devoted his time to trying to outwit them.
‘He was always scheming,’ he said. ‘We worked in pairs, not so much because Jonty was violent, but because he was highly manipulative and could easily manipulate a lone carer.’
In the year before the Tate attack, Bravery called police to his flat, saying he was thinking of killing people. He then attacked an officer.
Charged with assault, the prosecution was dropped, reinforcing Bravery’s sense that there would be no consequences for his actions. A serious case review subsequently carried out into the Tate attack said people thought Bravery was ‘attention seeking’.
As a result, he was given more freedoms – ultimately allowing the then 17-year-old to visit central London unaccompanied on August 4, 2019.
What has since emerged is that Bravery went there with one intention and one intention alone – to kill.
He attempted to enter The Shard, the tallest structure in Britain, but when he found the entry ticket was too expensive he asked for directions to the ‘next highest building’.
Arriving at Tate Modern he headed to the top of the gallery’s viewing tower. There he spotted the French boy, who was on day four of his family’s summer holiday to London.
At his sentencing, the court heard that Bravery ‘scooped him up and, without any hesitation, carried him straight to the railings and threw him over’.
The boy plunged head-first down the tower’s sloping side and landed in a heap on the fifth-floor roof of the main part of the gallery. The court heard he had smashed his head, was bleeding heavily and had broken his arms, legs, and hips, and his right ankle was ‘almost detached’.
The viewing gallery on the tenth floor at the Tate Modern in London, from where Bravery threw the boy
The Daily Mail can reveal that Bravery was in fact only moved to Broadmoor, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, two years ago
Harrowing images of the aftermath were caught on CCTV.
Bravery could be seen smiling and laughing. The boy’s father, disbelieving and then panicking, challenged the teenager, asking if he was mad. Bravery replied: ‘Yes, I am mad.’
During his police interview, Bravery claimed he had heard ‘voices’ telling him to kill, but he later admitted making this up.
Shown footage of the atrocity, he laughed as it played. He would later reveal that he had planned the attack ‘to prove a point to every idiot who said he did not have a mental-health problem’.
Bravery pleaded guilty to attempted murder in December 2019. When it came to sentencing, one of the psychiatrists who had assessed Bravery recommended he be sent to Broadmoor, where he had been held on remand. But in the end the judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, chose to sentence him to life in prison, with a minimum 15-year term.
‘That is to reflect the need to protect the public, to mark the terrible thing you have done with a penal sanction and, in so far as is possible, to offer support for any prospect of rehabilitation, if such a prospect is ever viable,’ she said. ‘What you did on the day of this offence, the way in which you have behaved before and since the offence prove that you are and will remain a grave danger to the public.’
He would subsequently be given a second prison sentence of 14 weeks for an attack he carried out at Broadmoor on two members of staff in January 2020 while awaiting sentence for the Tate attack.
He punched nursing assistant Sarah Edwards in the head and face before pulling her hair, after she said she was going to clean his room. He then bit Maxwell King, a rehabilitation therapist assistant, on his finger after he came to his colleague’s aid.
Having spent several years at Belmarsh, he was returned to Broadmoor in 2023.
It was here, in September 2024, that he carried out his latest attack on staff.
Bravery refused to attend the trial at Westminster Magistrates’ Court but the case went ahead in his absence.
The court heard that having asked to use the toilet he returned to the bedroom and attempted to climb onto the window ledge, saying that he wanted to end his life.
As they attempted to restrain him, nurses Linda McKinlay and Kate Mastalerz were injured.
Giving evidence, Ms McKinlay told how Bravery became ‘very, very aggressive, screaming and shouting’.
‘He turned himself to the right, trying to grab Katie, and that’s when he then turned and took his aggression out on me,’ she said.
‘He was kicking, we managed to get his legs up and he attacked my face by clawing at my face. My face and near my eye was all scratched and bleeding.’
Asked how she felt, she said: ‘At the time it was just a case of dealing with the situation, but afterwards I was very shaky and couldn’t believe it happened.
‘In all my years being in Broadmoor I’d never been attacked before, so it was a real shock.’
Ms Mastalerz suffered bruising to her thigh.
Bravery was found guilty of two counts of assault and will be sentenced in January.
Of course, any sanction will ultimately make little difference to the length of time he stays locked up, which will cost taxpayers many millions.
The cost of keeping an inmate in prison is about £55,000 a year. At a high-security hospital and with round-the-clock supervision, Bravery’s annual care bill would be many times that. Official figures show that a bed at Broadmoor cost £325,000 in 2013. Inflation alone would have pushed that figure to almost half a million pounds.
A similar sum, in other words, to the £500,000 that well-wishers generously donated towards the on-going care needs of Bravery’s victim, who is also facing a life sentence of a very different kind. In October, in the latest of a number of updates, it was revealed that the boy’s condition continues to improve – and that the 12-year-old is now able to ‘run, jump and swim again’.
‘He can’t do it like other children his age, of course, but we can no longer describe what he does in any other way than by saying it’s running, jumping and swimming,’ his family said.
‘It’s different, only over a few metres or a very small height, but it’s an incredible achievement. We are happy that he has been able to reach this stage of progress before his next operation.’
The unnamed boy is due to undergo the latest in a string of operations next year that will leave him immobilised for two months. Doctors have told him he should regain more movement after the treatment.
Thanking supporters, his family added: ‘The coming months promise to be busy, but we will continue to devote all our energy to our little knight, who is always so courageous.’