Serif Aslan was found guilty of the murder of schoolboy Kasey Gordon in Tottenham

A judge today accused a Tottenham care home of being “wholly inadequate” as he sentenced one of its patients to a minimum of 20 years behind bars for the murder of local schoolboy Kasey Gordon.

Victim: Kasey Gordon

Judge Richard Marks said Ashness House had failed to ensure Serif Aslan was taking his medication properly in the months which led up to him stabbing the 15-year-old through the heart with a kitchen knife in front of horrified shoppers on West Green Road in January last year.

Judge Marks told paranoid schizophrenic Aslan his “non-compliance” with his medication plan had played a significant role in the murder, but he criticised the private care home, in Philip Lane, for its systems which “were plainly wholly inadequate” in Aslan’s case – an accusation Ashness House, rated excellent by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2009, has refuted.

Director Nick Purchase said: “All our medication processes were monitored by the CQC, the police and the clinical team at the time. We had systems in place for when Aslan did not take it on that one occasion.”

Judge Marks said alarm bells should have rung when Aslan, 34, began experiencing psychotic symptoms and paranoid ideas in November and December 2010 and rushed into his room “on two occasions” after he had been given medication, giving rise to suspicions he had not in fact swallowed the drugs.

Judge Marks told Aslan: “All of these matters in my view should have put those who were entrusted with your care at Ashness House on notice... to ensure that you were very closely monitored so as to check you were taking your medication. This clearly did not happen.”

Aslan is now facing the prospect of life behind bars after Judge Marks sentenced him to a minimum of 20 years at the Old Bailey – but the jail term is nothing compared to the hole left in the lives of the Park View pupil’s family.

His mother Verona said: “There are no words. There is nothing I can say that will help anyone to comprehend the death and the incomprehensibility of a future without Kasey. My home is no longer a home, but a house with a bolt. I pass his bedroom every day and feel such ache in my soul. Where has my boy gone from my life?

“It is unbearable not to hear him calling me or seeing his smile come through the door. He was the soul of my family.”

But she said she was not looking for “justice or retribution” for Aslan, asking: “That man is truly insane. What justice would we gain?”