What happened
In the early hours of 26 July 2015, Jenny Foote, 38, was on an overnight shift at Collette House, a mental health residential home in Acton, west London. She had worked there for three months.
A neighbour complained about noise from the television in the room of a resident, Michael Meanza. Foote went to his room, spoke to him in the doorway for about five minutes and returned to her office, locking the door. Just before 6am Meanza came downstairs, forced his way in, and punched and kicked her and beat her about the head. He left, came back and hit her again. Police arrived at 6.57am and paramedics pronounced her dead at 7.24am.
The outcome
Meanza, 47, had paranoid schizophrenia and anti-social personality disorder. In April 2015 he had been discharged from a section 37 hospital order carrying a section 41 restriction imposed after a common assault years earlier, and was required to live at Collette House.
He admitted manslaughter but denied murder. A jury at the Central Criminal Court convicted him of murder on 2 March 2016. Judge Bevan QC imposed life with a minimum term of 24 years, reduced on appeal to 21 years, less 217 days on remand.
Foote’s brother said afterwards that lessons had to be learned about placing a man with 16 previous convictions in a less secure environment.
What went wrong
Foote was alone in the building. The record’s reading is that schemes of this kind leave one person on site overnight with no second responder, and no source describes anyone else arriving before the police did.
A man with 16 previous convictions and a restricted hospital order was living in a setting less secure than the one he came from. The worker who met him before 6am was three months into the job. Her office door was locked, and the lock did not hold.
No inquest, employer prosecution or regulator report on the home’s systems appears in the public record. The appeal judgment deals with the sentence only. This page can say what the staffing was, not what the employer assessed, because no source states it.
What it teaches
The task killed her, not the diagnosis. Asking a man to turn his television down is the most ordinary thing a night worker does, and it is exactly the kind of request that leaves a lone worker in a doorway with nobody behind them.
Out of hours is a staffing question before it is a training question. If the answer to “who is coming?” is an office that opens at nine, the person on shift has a phone and nothing else. A rota that puts one worker alone in a building of residents with serious mental illness needs a second body on site.
Questions for the room
- On your out-of-hours rota, who can reach the building within ten minutes?
- When a routine request to a resident starts to escalate, where do you go in that building?
- How is low-level friction with a resident recorded, so the next worker sees a pattern and not an incident?
- If a discharge summary says restricted hospital order, what does the night worker get told?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. Two sources were read in full: the BBC News report of the conviction and the Court of Appeal judgment in R v Meanza [2017] EWCA Crim 445. A third source, the 2026 course deck, could not be read. The vault record’s dates conflict (27 July and 7 July), so this page follows the pack: 26 July 2015. No source describes the home’s lone worker arrangements.
Our lone working training covers night-shift cover and the check-in that has to sit behind it.
Sources
- BBC News, 2016 · https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-35709576
- National Archives, Find Case Law · R v Meanza [2017] EWCA Crim 445 · https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/crim/2017/445
Reviewed 20 October 2026.