Monday 14 January 2013

Postscript...

Remember Neil Whittaker-Axon, the man who wasn't 'an ordinary person', according to Chairman of the Bench Colin Thompson?
The father of two said he had 'embarrassed his family' by losing his job at bus firm Finglands.
He had a mental breakdown and became paranoid, claiming that someone had given him a pie which was poisoned and that he was being watched by police and social services.
After telling a psychiatrist he had three choices - going to hospital, getting shot in the head or killing himself, Mr Whittaker-Axon plunged from the top of an aqueduct near Stockport, Greater Manchester.
Strangely, he's described merely as a bus driver. The inquest makes no mention of the former public service career that so impressed Mr Thompson...

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Comments on the previous article referred to seem to think that this chap was from London rather than Manchester. However assulting a pensioner and using a bus as an offensive weapon the world is probably a better place without him.

Robert the Biker said...

No loss to the world, pity he didn't pick on someone more his own size who couls have knocked the crap out of him.
Worthless shitbox.

SadButMadLad said...

Another failure of the state system to look after him. He should have been placed in a mental hospital.

MTG said...

A former cowardly policeman (the type to make a hobby of injuring those least able to defend themselves) met his end through self-inflicted head injuries.

Seeking plod employment is an indicator of partial brain death but I nevertheless hope the injuries sustained in his fall were not so severe as to cause 'instant' death.

Woman on a Raft said...

Sorry, can't remember now why I thought he might have moved to Manchester rather than living there the whole time.

I think SBML may be right; perhaps he was already badly out of it and had simply engaged in a fantasy which happened to include the idea that he'd been in the police, and the magistrate didn't check, having assumed this was objectively true.

The interesting thing about the link to today's story, though, is that the photo the Mail may or may not to be the deceased Neil Whittaker-Axon. They've grabbed a FB photo which looks rather like him and has the same name, but it also looks like a younger somewhat duskier man with interests more typical of someone in their early 20s, not their late 30s.

Cheekily, Cavendish Press are claiming copyright in a photo they have no copyright in, assuming that the person presenting themselves as Neil Whittaker-Axon didn't deliberately choose a bad photo of someone else as an avatar. But who knows?

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if it really is the late Neil Whittaker-Axon or someone who has now been misidentified as a convicted offender in Manchester.

https://en-gb.facebook.com/neil.whittakeraxon

Woman on a Raft said...

A picture of the person earlier identified as Neil Whittaker-Axon

JuliaM said...

"Another failure of the state system to look after him. He should have been placed in a mental hospital."

We seem to be running out of those as fast as we are at prisons...

"Anyway, it will be interesting to see if it really is the late Neil Whittaker-Axon or someone who has now been misidentified as a convicted offender in Manchester. "

That would be another possibility of course! Look at the rush to identify the Sandy Hook shooter that lead to his brother being wrongly fingered for it!

The picture could be an old one? Maybe he never deleted his Facebook page?

It's an unusual enough name the MSM would have felt confident they'd got the right man.

Fahrenheit211 said...

SadButMadLad

One of the worst things that were done in the field of mental health was to close down the old asylums. They provided a safe secure environment for those who whether permanantly or temporarily found that their illness prevented them from taking part in society. Also the stigma and shame attached to a mental hospital admission meant that those who could function outside a hospital worked bloody hard to stay out of one.

I can't help thinking that the increase in mental illness fakery in order to claim benefits only came about when 'care in the community' became the flavour of the month. Now people can claim they are 'ill' with no cost to themselves or their self image or their standing amongst neighbours etc. Now that there is no shame attached to Mental illness more people are claiming it for financial reasons.

PJH said...

"It's an unusual enough name the MSM would have felt confident they'd got the right man. "

Or simply mis-captioned/put up the wrong photo and it's that of the victim, not the perpetrator, though that sort of thing would never happen.

Would it?