Authorities are under scrutiny for allowing the individual responsible for the tragic death of 12-year-old Leo Ross to remain at large, despite a history of terrorizing his community.

The assailant, a 15-year-old whose identity is protected due to his age, admitted to murdering the young student and committing a series of alarming assaults in the same Birmingham park.

Disturbing footage captured by police body cameras, released after the conviction, reveals the teenager feigning innocence as he stood near paramedics who were desperately trying to save Leo’s life.

In the video, he can be heard nonchalantly misleading an officer by claiming, “He was lying there when I arrived… I didn’t touch him because I didn’t want to be implicated.”

Leo succumbed to a single stab wound to his abdomen after being unexpectedly attacked on his way home from school on January 21 of the previous year. He was the fourth person assaulted by his killer in a span of just three days.

Described as a model student without any known adversaries, Leo appears to have been chosen by his significantly larger attacker purely because he presented an easy target.

The Daily Mail can now reveal that his killer had a reputation for violent delinquency in the Hall Green area of Birmingham where he lived – and was well known to police.

He is understood to have been booted out of mainstream education and even a specialist pupil referral unit after breaking a teacher’s nose and bringing a knife into class.

His expulsion meant he routinely spent his days marauding around his neighbourhood – usually on a bicycle or a scooter – causing trouble and vandalising property.

Footage obtained exclusively by the Daily Mail captured the moment he threw a brick through a shop window close to his house in a random act of vandalism around six months before the killing, to the alarm and bafflement of staff inside.

Family friends have told the Mail they believe the teenager first began to fly off the rails following the arrest of his father on suspicion of rape allegations.

‘The family are known to the police,’ one long-time acquaintance of the family said.

‘The amount of times he’s been brought home by the police, it’s loads.’

Another neighbour said: ‘Everyone round here is scared of him.’

It was only on January 19 last year that it became clear his taste for wanton lawlessness had metastasised into something truly dangerous.

An elderly woman was walking alone along the banks of the River Cole in Trittiford Mill Park when she was subjected to an unprovoked, utterly vicious assault.

Her teenage assailant beat her with her own walking stick, inflicting serious injuries, before pushing her into the river.

Deploying a ‘really sinister’ tactic he would resurrect after stabbing Leo two days later, the boy then pretended to be a witness and ran over to alert another passerby to the assault.

Having raised the alarm, the boy then waited around until the police and the ambulance service were called.

The following day he returned to the park and attacked another woman who was walking on her own, again leaving her seriously injured. This time he fled the scene.

By now, officers had a description of a suspect, according to Det Insp Joe Davenport of West Midlands Police: ‘A boy, about 14 years old, all black clothing, riding a bike, attacking vulnerable people in a small area of Trittiford Mill Park.’

Yet despite the description of the assailant clearly matching the boy claiming to be a bystander – and that very boy already being known to the police – he was not arrested.

To those who know the killer’s family, it represented a clear missed opportunity.

A family friend told the Mail: ‘Modern policing is wrong at the end of the day. They could have saved that lad by putting him in a cage.

‘If they’d dealt with him properly in the first place with the assaults, it wouldn’t have happened.

‘He was thinking “I’m going to do it again and until I kill someone you’re not going to do anything”.’

The boy, he said, was a ‘loner’ whose aggression had meant no one wanted to socialise with him.  

The family friend described seeing the boy just a few hours before Leo was killed, when he spotted him ‘walking up the road, talking to himself, shouting to himself, saying to himself what he was going to do and stuff like that’.

CCTV footage captured the boy shortly afterwards as he set out to launch yet more attacks in the park.

Once again, he was riding a bicycle and dressed entirely in black, with a hood pulled up over his head.

His attention first settled on another lone woman walking in the park and he began to attack her, but was forced to flee when his assault was interrupted.

The boy did not flee far, however, with CCTV showing him simply looping around the park looking for his next victim.

At around this time, Leo had begun his walk home from Christ Church of England Secondary Academy School, which took him through the centre of the park.

It was a route that, tragically, led him straight into the clutches of his killer.

Leo was caught on camera for the final time a few moments earlier, wearing his school uniform and the hood of his coat turned up against the cold.

It is unclear precisely what happened next, but police are confident Leo would have done nothing to provoke the terrible fate that befell him.

Det Insp Davenport said Leo was a ‘model student’ with a perfect behaviour record at school, while his family insisted he did not have ‘one aggressive bone in his body’.

The only clue to what unfolded lay in the injuries. A single stab wound, with no further injuries found on either Leo or his attacker – suggesting a quick, ruthless assault.

After inflicting the fatal wound with a kitchen knife, his killer once again began the charade of an innocent bystander and rushed to get the attention of a woman nearby.

He then brazenly remained at the scene until the emergency services arrived and began CPR on Leo.

Seemingly without a care in the world, he was recorded on bodyworn camera telling an officer he had been cycling to a mechanic’s shop when he saw Leo lying stricken on the ground.

‘I went to get some help from different people and that’s all I know about it,’ he said.

‘He was lay there like that when I got here.’

He added: ‘I didn’t touch him because that could put me in the case.’

Within three hours, he had been arrested when dozens of police officers stormed his home.

A witness said:  ‘When (he) was in the back of the van, there were at least 10 officers in there with him. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a s***. He’ll call the coppers d***heads and he’ll tell them to f*** off. He’s got no fear.’ 

His arrogance had indeed not deserted him by this stage, with Det Insp Davenport confirming the boy taunted officers – boasting that they would not find any evidence to pin the crime on him.

He was wrong. In the river, police divers found the murder weapon – from which investigators were able to recover both his DNA and the DNA of Leo.

West Midlands Police are now under scrutiny for their failure to take the teenage killer off the streets sooner.

It has emerged the boy was the suspect in a string of attacks which pre-dated the killing by some months – a total of four assaults, including two on police officers, between October and December 2024 – but he was only charged after being arrested for Leo’s murder.

The charges relating to the police officers were ultimately dropped and he yesterday pleaded not guilty to the other two assaults, which prosecutors agreed not to pursue.

The Mail has been told he was known for fighting with other boys in the park and had been brought back to his address repeatedly by the police after running away from home.

A few weeks before the killing, a neighbour had seen the boy running onto their road out of breath. When he asked what he was doing, the boy claimed he was being chased by police after stealing someone’s tobacco pouch.

The shopkeeper who had the brick thrown through his window ‘for no reason’ said he had not reported the matter to the police because ‘he didn’t manage to break anything’ – but added the boy had a real reputation locally for causing trouble.

One family friend said the boy’s aggression had become so serious that he immediately suspected he was responsible for the stabbing.

He said: ‘It’s his aggression, you can tell he’s going to be trouble…when I heard of the stabbing, I said to my friend right away “that’s him”.’

Det Insp Davenport rejected criticism of the force, telling the Mail: ‘There’s two different elements. With the previous assaults and those investigations, owing to his age and his lack of previous criminal history, it’s not like he was ever going to have gone to prison as a result of those cases.

‘The other side is the investigations into the assaults on January 19 and January 20 – on each occasion we were just given a description and the assaults happened so quickly after each other.

‘He wasn’t known to the police in terms of fingerprints or DNA and it would take longer to do CCTV inquiries to eventually figure out who this person was. That can be a slow process.

‘Unfortunately, it wasn’t quick enough to identify him and stop what happened to Leo.’

Police have confirmed a child safeguarding practicing review is currently examining the circumstances of the case.  

For one friend of the killer’s family, who asked not to be named, the boy they once knew as a ‘lovely lad’ had been warped into a violent criminal by a troubled home life which allegedly saw him beaten by his father.

They said that on one occasion, the boy was beaten within the view of a neighbour.

‘I don’t think he’s a bad lad, I think he’s been raised in a bad environment,’ they said.

‘There was quite a lot of abuse in that household from dad to son. 

‘Personally, I think this was all his way of getting out of the house.’

For Leo’s family, the pain is only deepened by the senseless manner of his death.

Following the verdicts,

Leo’s heartbroken birth mother Rachel Fisher said: ‘My son Leo was the sweetest, most kind-hearted boy. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body.

‘My baby’s life was stolen for no reason what so ever.

‘My life will never be the same again without him. He will be loved and missed forever.’

Leo’s foster family, the Westons, added: ‘Not a day goes by where we don’t think about Leo.

‘His loss has impacted us deeply and his absence is felt constantly.

‘Leo was the sweetest, kindest boy who put others before himself.

‘He was loved by all that knew him, he made friends with everyone he met, young or old.

‘He was wise beyond his years, full of knowledge and facts, full of life. A life cut short by a senseless act.

‘We hope justice is served and we can get some closure, whatever the outcome, it still does not give Leo his life back, the life he truly deserved to live to its fullest.’