The Old Bailey heard today (April 4) schizophrenic Sekai Miles, 23, of Brent Cross Gardens, Hendon, inflicted horrific injuries on an elderly man in a completely unprovoked attack – two months after his community treatment order was not renewed.
A doctor had told him he did not have schizophrenia and allowed it to lapse.
Over the following weeks, Miles repeatedly made strange comments to mental health workers about God curing him of his condition.
In the early hours of February 27, 2024, he twice threatened to kill a member of staff at Harold Wood train station.
When he encountered 87-year-old Bernard Fowler at the same station, Miles gouged his eyes before beating him to death with his own walking stick.
He returned 15 minutes later and posed triumphantly over Mr Fowler’s body.
Mr Fowler, of Hamilton Drive, Harold Wood, suffered numerous facial fractures and bleeds on the brain.
The court heard Miles’s mental illness first became apparent at around age ten.
At 12 he was referred to clinical psychologists after reporting that he had been hearing voices for eight months.
There followed a long gap in treatment until early 2023, when he was twice admitted to psychiatric hospitals.
That June, he was put on a community treatment order requiring monthly injections of antipsychotic medication.
His schizophrenia in 2023 was brought on, testified forensic psychiatrist Dr Oliver White, by cannabis use, which he called “a clear precipitating factor”.
Miles even requested a third hospital admission to help him stop smoking cannabis, but was told that was not possible.
In November 2023, a doctor told Miles he didn’t have schizophrenia.
He noted: “He looks the best that I have seen him. No evidence of any psychosis or mood disorder.
“He has not been smoking cannabis. Wants to join the police but worried about schizophrenia being on his record.”
When Miles said he would refuse to take any more medication, the doctor said he disagreed with that decision but could not compel him to do so.
His community treatment order was “allowed to lapse” in December 2023.
Miles, the court heard, therefore believed he was “on the road to recovery”.
Three psychiatrists who examined him after he killed Mr Fowler in fact found he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, with “hallucinations and delusions”.
“He was extremely unwell – floridly psychotic – and therefore his decision-making was significantly impaired,” said Dr White.
Dr Jonathan Hafferty, appearing via video from Broadmoor Hospital, told Judge Judy Khan KC: “We have seen that when he is unwell, he can become dangerous – homicidally dangerous – very quickly.”
Defence barrister Brenda Campbell KC said the case was “worrying”.
In December 2023, visited by a mental health practitioner, Miles was described as being “neatly dressed, in much better shape and is making good progress”.
But by January 2024, he told a practitioner he was “spending his time evangelising” and “preaching the gospel”.
Nine days later he told a practitioner he had been “saved by God” and was not taking his medication “because God has been good to me”.
The following month, his mother contacted a medical centre with concerns Miles was “having delusions about religion”.
She described him as “staring into space” and “self-neglecting”.
In the same month, he was discharged from the Islington Crisis Team because he was no longer living in its catchment area.
Mrs Campbell suggested “warning signs” about Miles’s deteriorating mental health had been missed.
Prosecutor Ben Aina KC, argued Miles had “exacerbated” the problem by taking illegal drugs – a dip test in custody which gave a positive result for spice (synthetic cannabis).
But Miles denied using the drug, telling a doctor he had gone with his father on a trip to Turkey in October 2023 to help him abstain from cannabis and had not used it since.
He claimed never to have used spice and not to even know what spice looked like.
No evidence of cannabis was found on Miles or in his home after the killing.
He was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order for Mr Fowler’s killing.
