An inquest into the deaths of Michael and Marjorie Cawdery has found that their brutal murder could have been prevented. Coroner Maria Dougan said that if police and health services had not missed several opportunities, their killer Thomas Scott McEntee would not have been in Upper Ramone Park, where the pensioners lived. McEntee was attacked by severe mental illness at the time of the killings in 2017 and had received attention from police and health services in Newry, Warrenpoint, Belfast and Craigavon in the days preceding the fatal attack. Dougan criticised the police’s failure to enact mental health legislation on two occasions that would have seen McEntee taken to a place of safety and said that health services should have obtained all available information and better evaluated McEntee.
Dougan also criticised the information exchange between police and health services relating to McEntee and said that greater training was needed for police and medical staff in dealing with mental health issues. She said: “more work needs to be done to prevent families like the Cawderys suffering the same pain again.” The Southern Health and Social Care Trust said it accepted the coroner’s findings whilst a spokesperson for the Belfast Trust said the Trust was committed to learning from the findings
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