What happened
Tom Easton was a sound engineer and youth worker who lived in Holloway, north London. On 15 September, at teatime, he was at work at the EC1 Music studio in Old Street, which was run by Islington Council.
Barrington McKenzie, 23, came in with three friends and asked for a recording session. He had paranoid schizophrenia, was under the supervision of Newham social services, and had been allowed out of his hostel alone. A few hours earlier he had bought a carving knife in a shop in Islington.
An hour in, with no disagreement recorded between them, McKenzie attacked Easton, who had never seen him before. Easton died at the scene. McKenzie went back to his hostel and attacked a helper there.
The outcome
At the Old Bailey, Judge Brian Barker QC accepted McKenzie’s plea of not guilty to murder and his admission of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He ordered that McKenzie be held indefinitely at Broadmoor Hospital. Three psychiatrists told the court that McKenzie was not the master of his own mind.
An inquiry was ordered urgently into the care McKenzie had received.
What went wrong
The supervision is the finding. A man with paranoid schizophrenia, under the care of a local authority, was out of his hostel on his own, with the time and the freedom to buy a knife and find a room with people in it.
The sources do not record the terms of that inquiry, what it found, or whether anyone was disciplined. What is on the record is that a supervised patient was unsupervised in the community that day, and that a court was told the arrangement needed examining.
For Easton, the exposure was a public-facing room. A studio takes bookings from people who walk in, and the person at the desk decides who comes through. The sources do not say how many staff were on duty.
What it teaches
A community venue is a lone-working environment even when it does not feel like one. The risk does not arrive as a client with a file. It arrives as a customer, in a group, at the door, and the worker’s protection is the access rule and the second person in the building.
Where a venue sits near supported housing, staff need a named contact in the local mental health team. That is the difference between a phone call and an incident.
The other lesson is about status. Easton was a youth worker on a casual engagement in a small publicly funded studio. Nobody had assessed the room for the risk of a stranger with a knife, because it was not classified as a risky room.
Questions for the room
- If a group you did not book walks in, who decides whether they can use the space?
- Who is your named contact at the local mental health team, and when would you call them?
- What does your employer owe a sessional or freelance worker in a public building?
- If a colleague let someone in and you would not have, what is your right to reverse that?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. One contemporaneous national report was read, held in the vault as a named-case archive text. It records the killing, the plea and the order for an inquiry, but not the inquiry’s findings, so nothing here describes what it concluded. The sources give 15 September as the day of the killing but no year, and the record dates the trial to 2007, so no year is printed. Nothing is said about the studio’s staffing or access policy, because the sources say nothing about either.
Our lone working training covers lone working in public-facing venues.
Sources
- Vault archive, contemporaneous court reporting from the Old Bailey trial, held as a named-case text file
Reviewed 20 October 2026.