Ian Coates was fatally stabbed alongside two students in Nottingham, England, in June 2023
Credit: Nottinghamshire Police
NEED TO KNOW
- Ian Coates’ sons learned of his death through social media and pieced details together before police confirmed it
- The grandfather was one of three victims killed in a random stabbing attack in Nottingham, England, in June 2023
- Family members were initially told Coates died in a road collision
The son of a man who was fatally stabbed in 2023 has revealed that he found out about his father's death on Instagram.
On June 13, 2023, school custodian and grandfather Ian Coates, 65, was stabbed to death by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham, England, according to the BBC.
The random attack came after Calocane, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, stabbed University of Nottingham students Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar the same day at around 4 a.m.
Speaking at a public inquiry into the deaths on Tuesday, March 24, Ian’s sons James and Lee Coates revealed that they both heard that an incident had happened on the day of their father’s death through separate work group chats.
“I then went into work just to do a quick order and spoke to a few of the staff members there and we learnt that somebody had been killed on Magdala Road, which is just close to where I live,” James said, per a transcript. “So we had discussed that, but at this point we had no idea of what the whole thing had happened or who was involved. “
Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Calocane attacked Ian on Magdala Road at approximately 5:14 a.m., before stealing his van and using it to knock down three others in the city centre, per the BBC.
James said that it wasn’t until around 3 p.m. when he was walking home that he decided to check his Instagram.
“I'd not got notifications on, but I looked and I'd got a message and it was from a family friend, who is the mother of my dad's grandson, saying, ‘I can't believe what's happened to your dad.’ ”
He continued, “And my first instinct is that it's a hoax message that she's been hacked and it's trying to get me to ring this number. So I asked her, ‘Is this a joke?’ And she messaged me again reiterating that I should call and so decided to call.”
James recalled that the family friend was in "hysterics."
“She said she had been told that my dad had been in a road traffic accident, but she'd seen what had been going off in Nottingham and this terror event and that she didn't know if it was linked.”
James said he didn’t know what to say and "still didn't believe it," but knew he had to get more information.
After calling family members and a helpline, James said he received a call from the police “10 minutes before” authorities did a press conference to inform the media about the incident.
“By then we'd pieced almost everything together ourselves from social media and from the news, so then it was just a case of them apologizing that we had to do that,” James said.
Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty
He also opened up about finding out that his father’s body had remained at the scene until the evening.
“I think we knew that he was still there when we got the phone call from the police around 5 p.m,” he said. “ I remember how hard, knowing that it was only around the corner, how hard it was to restrain ourselves to go.”
“It’s only recently through the Inquiry, and the information that's coming out, that I've learnt that he was there until 8:30 p.m. at night," he added.
James' brother Lee also spoke about the extreme lengths they went through to try and get more information from authorities.
“We were calling I think, is it, 101, the non-emergency? We were ringing the helpline. I even went to the lengths of ringing 999 to try and get some information,” he said.
Lee added that he was trying to liaise with Elaine, his father’s partner, "because they'd been appointed a FLO [family liaison] officer and I'd spoken briefly to him, to which he replied, ‘We don't have enough police officers for you and all your brothers’, which I thought was quite rude and disrespectful, bearing in mind that no one had been in any sort of contact properly with us until,” police spoke at the press conference.
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Ian's widow Elaine Newton also said during the inquiry that she was told by police that her partner had died in a road traffic accident.
"It took four agonizing hours before I was finally told the truth,” she said, per the transcript.
Elaine recalled that an officer asked if she knew what happened to which she replied, "Yes, Ian was in an RTA, but I don't know any more information than that."
"“And they looked shocked on their faces and said, ‘You have got the wrong information. You've been told the wrong information. Ian's been killed and he's been stabbed,' " she added. “It felt like I was … he'd been killed twice.”
"It was like … it wasn't right. The first information that I accepted but the second one I couldn't accept because it was two informations I'd been given," she continued. "So you don't know which one was true, or have they got the wrong person? I felt it was all not right. It was just a mess."
PEOPLE reached out to Nottinghamshire Police for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
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