As is frequently the case in mass shootings, Jake Davison’s eight-minute burst of savagery began with a domestic attack on a woman.
Davison, 22, thickset and strong thanks to a combination of gym work and steroids, argued violently with his mother, Maxine, 51, in the modest Plymouth home they shared.
Davison, who was obsessed with corrosive incel (involuntary celibate) culture and fascinated by mass killings, grabbed Maxine by the throat and locked her in a bedroom of their red-bricked house.
She phoned a relative begging for help but before anyone had a chance to intervene, he picked up his pump-action shotgun – legally held - and fired at his mother twice, once from just 1 metre away. She had no chance of surviving.
During a five-week inquest held amid tight security in the incongruous surroundings of Exeter racecourse, many tears have been shed at the details of what happened on a sun-splashed August evening two years ago, not just by the families and friends of victims but by police officers, lawyers and court staff.
The gunman – it is almost always a man in shootings like this and research suggests victims are disproportionately women – left his house and immediately happened upon Lee Martyn, 43, who worked for a yacht company, and his three-year-old daughter, Sophie, as they walked the family bulldog, Mabel. Sophie, wearing a white dress, was pushing her teddy bear in a scruffy buggy.
Martyn was shot three times, Sophie – nicknamed “Daddy’s princess” – once, from just a metre away. Witnesses who saw the pair lying on the road in the aftermath said they looked as if they were cradling each other. “The little girl was facing the man and they looked really peaceful,” said one neighbour. “The dad still had his arm around the little girl.”
Davison fired off shots into the home of his neighbours Michelle Parker and her son, Ben Parsonage, injuring both. “He had a smirk on his face, like he didn’t care what he was doing,” said Parsonage.
The gunman left the cul-de-sac and walked into a small park, where he came upon Stephen Washington, 59, a full-time carer for his disabled wife, Sheila, as he walked Poppy, their husky cross. Davison shot him dead.
Davison did not break paces as he left the park and came upon his final victim, Kate Shepherd, 66-year-old artist, outside a hairdressing salon, as she walked home from a shopping trip. She was shot from a distance of no more than 3 metres.
Five people – a girl, two women, two men – had been fatally shot in about eight minutes.
Davison disappeared into a side street then returned to the spot where emergency services were tending to Shepherd. An unarmed officer, PC Zach Printer, ran towards Davison shouting at him to stand still.
He got within 20 metres before Davison turned his weapon on himself and pulled the trigger about 19 minutes after he had shot his mother. He suffered fatal head injuries.
News of the shootings spread quickly around the Keyham area of Plymouth, a tight-knit neighbourhood close to the naval dockyard.
Rebecca Martyn, Lee’s wife and Sophie’s mother, went out looking for her husband and daughter. A police officer took the nurse’s details at the cordon that had been set up and she went home. Not long after officers knocked on her door telling her what had happened.
She is sure the pair’s final pose, cradling each other, showed her husband died trying to save Sophie. “As a family man, he would have chosen to protect his family,” she said.
Sheila Washington knew that something bad had happened when the family’s dog arrived back at home alone, scratching on the front door and shaking. Her worst fears were realised when plainclothes officers arrived.
John Shepherd, Kate’s husband of 40 years, became anxious when she did not arrive home and also went searching. He came upon his wife being tended to by emergency services. His testimony is heart-breaking: “There were screens around her, and I could only see her feet. I was told after a short time it was Kate,” he said.
Nobody could have anticipated what Davison, an apprentice crane operator, did on 12 August 2021, but Devon and Cornwall police accept he definitely should not have been given the chance. He should never have been granted a certificate for his pump-action shotgun.
For a start, Davison had a history of violence and a fascination with weapons – which was known to the authorities. The violence began at Mount Tamar school, which caters for people who have an autism spectrum condition, as Davison had. At school he punched a fellow pupil and put one teacher in a headlock and head-butted another.
The school, the child and adolescent mental health services and his GP all knew of and noted Davison’s obsession with firearms as a child and teenager. He dreamt of running a target range in the US or becoming a sniper.
When Davison was 18 his mother raised her deep concerns, telling careers advisers he was “fixated” with guns and would spend hours online chatting to “rednecks in Texas”. The careers people were concerned enough to contact the local Prevent programme, which is designed to divert people away from terrorism, though they did not take up the case.
In July 2017, Davison applied for a shotgun certificate, claiming he wanted to use it for clay pigeon shooting. He got a former teacher to stand as a referee, declared autism and Asperger’s syndrome on the form and gave officers permission to approach his GP.
Little or no weight was given to Davison’s violent history, which the police knew about, or his long fascination with firearms. They wrote to Davison’s GP asking for information about him but, as was common at the time, the doctor declined to provide a report because it sought “an opinion on matters falling outside my medical expertise”.
This was taken to mean there was no relevant information and in January 2018 Davison’s certificate was granted and he became the legal holder of a Weatherby pump-action shotgun.
The licensing officer who recommended Davison be granted his shotgun certificate accepted in court that Devon and Cornwall’s firearms and explosives licensing unit was a “dangerous shambles” and revealed he had been given no formal training to do his job.
Ch Supt Roy Linden, who leads the force’s learning improvement following the tragedy, told the inquest there had been a raft of problems within the unit including budgetary pressures, a reduction in staff numbers, IT issues – and a cultural problem with officers too tolerant of risk.
Davison’s violence escalated. In September 2020, he got into a row with teenagers in a skate park after one of them called him fat. Davison punched a 16-year-old boy at least five times, possibly knocking him out, and slapped a 15-year-old girl. He went home, grabbed his shotgun and loaded it, threatening to go back to the park, but his mother talked him down.
He was arrested over the attacks and – after a delay - his shotgun and certificate were seized. The criminal justice system was facing backlogs because of the pandemic and rather than being charged with an offence that would have led to a court appearance and almost certainly meant he would have lost his shotgun, Davison was enrolled on a restorative justice programme.
Extraordinarily – and quite wrongly – Davison was given his shotgun and certificate back in July 2021, without the decision being reviewed by a senior officer, as it should have been. Devon and Cornwall police accept they should not have returned the weapon.
For years Davison had acted badly towards his mother. Former partners of his mother said he treated her “like a slave” and there were many rows, which sometimes ended in him punching holes in walls. In the weeks leading up to the attack Davison said he hated her and called her “vile”.
He became increasingly obsessed with incel culture, posting a video about the park attack, stating: “This is why incels were more prone to killing themselves – or going on a killing spree.”
Davison described himself as “a virgin … fat, ugly” but also said: “I like to think sometimes I’m the Terminator.” He name-checked Elliot Rodger, a US mass killer “idolised” by incels and researched the 1987 Hungerford mass shootings in Berkshire in which 16 people were killed.
In the days before the killings, he searched for information about the US serial killer Ted Bundy, watched videos of firearms and how to use them and posted a clip from an online game called Killzone.
Just hours before the shootings, he viewed an online thread asking why incels felt the need to end their own lives and looked up posts on kidnappings.
The police have insisted there was no evidence that Davison planned the attacks or that the shootings were inspired by incel culture. But relatives of the victims and many Keyham residents do not believe this.
During the inquest the families of Davison’s victims were stoic, steadfast, inspiring. They want wide-ranging changes to the gun licensing laws and much more thought to be given on how to deal with misogyny and incel culture.
Luke Pollard, the MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, said their motivation was that there was no repeat. “Lessons need to be learned and quickly,” he said. “There’s a real determination in Keyham that no other community should have to go through this.”
