Son killed mother in row over ‘milky tea’

Mentally ill Thomas Westwood locked up indefinitely after he stabbed Susan 17 times

Thomas Westwood (West Midlands Police)

A man who stabbed his own mother to death after a row over the amount of milk in her tea has been locked up indefinitely.

Mentally ill Thomas Westwood repeatedly knifed his mother, Susan, at their Coventry home after he said she told him a brew he had made her was not milky enough.

He was sentenced to 16 years in prison at Warwick Crown Court but was also made the subject of an indefinite hospital order.

He had already admitted manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility at an earlier hearing.

Peter Grieves-Smith, prosecuting, said the 47-year-old initially told detectives his mother, 68, had pulled a knife on him after the argument about the tea on 1 December, 2017.

But he later withdrew the claim and admitted the killing had not been in self-defence.

A post mortem found Ms Westwood was stabbed at least 17 times.

Mr Grieves-Smith said unemployed Westwood had suffered mental health problems since the Eighties and had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder.

He slept on the sofa at his mother’s one-bedroom home in Coventry’s Tile Hill area, and she did all she could to support him, the court heard.

Sentencing, Judge Andrew Lockhart accepted Westwood’s condition was a significant factor in the killing but ruled it was not the sole cause, the BBC reported.

He said: “I am clear that whilst you have long-standing mental health problems, you felt great anger towards your mother – anger was the primary and driving reason why you killed her.”