Boy who was thrown 100 feet from Tate Modern balcony by Jonty Bravery enjoys first weekend at home

Boy who was thrown 100 feet from Tate Modern balcony by Jonty Bravery when he was six enjoys first weekend at home and trip to the seaside

  • The French boy was on holiday with parents when he was hurled from the gantry 
  • He suffered life threatening injuries after falling 100ft but is slowly recovering
  • Autistic teenager Jonty Bravery, from west London, hurled the boy off platform 
  •  After his arrest Bravery told detectives he did it so that he could be on television

The French boy who was thrown from the Tate Modern viewing platform while on holiday has been able to return home for a weekend for the first time since the atttack, his parents have revealed.

The boy was six-years-old when autistic teenager Jonty Bravery hurled him from the attraction’s 100ft gantry on August 4 last year.

He spent a month in hospital in the UK before being discharged to France.

The latest update on a GoFundMe page, which has raised more than £240,000 for the boy’s medical treatment, included comments from the boy’s parents who said he had returned home ‘just for a weekend’.

They also said their ‘little knight’ had his first holiday since the incident and had been taken to the seaside where ‘he was able to build sandcastles with a friend’.

Jonty Bravery executed his planned attack when he was allowed on an unsupervised trip to the art gallery. The victim, a French boy, survived the 100ft fall, but suffered life-changing injuries - including a bleed on the brain and multiple broken bones - and remains in a wheelchair

Jonty Bravery executed his planned attack when he was allowed on an unsupervised trip to the art gallery. The victim, a French boy, survived the 100ft fall, but suffered life-changing injuries – including a bleed on the brain and multiple broken bones – and remains in a wheelchair 

The boy remains in a wheelchair ‘most of his day’ but is able to walk a few metres with support and has even begun to climb steps.

His parents said his breathing and memory have improved enough that he has begun to try singing ‘and to learn to read, little by little’.

Bravery, who has autism and a personality disorder, was a ‘looked after child’ under the care of Hammersmith and Fulham Council at the time of the incident, after which he told horrified onlookers social services were to blame for the atrocity.

Jonty Bravery was jailed for life for attempted murder when he threw a six-year-old boy from the Tate Modern viewing gantry

Jonty Bravery was jailed for life for attempted murder when he threw a six-year-old boy from the Tate Modern viewing gantry

He later admitted attempted murder and in June was sentenced to 15 years in prison at the Old Bailey. 

Bravery was in council care but ‘frequently assaulted’ his carers and had been arrested for attacking them, the Old Bailey heard.

Yet he was considered safe to go by himself on a day trip to London, where he hurled the French schoolboy off a 100ft balcony and then smirked to the youngster’s distraught father: ‘I’m mad.’

Bravery had researched the easiest way to kill someone in advance of the incident, on August 4 last year, and had ‘searched for the most vulnerable child’ at the gallery , a court today heard.

He told detectives that he had planned the attack to get on the TV news and later told medical experts he felt ‘undestructable’ (Sic) and ‘on top of the world’ after throwing the boy off the viewing platform.

He later claimed he had heard voices in his heard telling him to ‘kill people’ and said he ‘wanted to be on the news’ so that people – ‘especially his parents’ – could see it was a ‘mistake’ not to put him in hospital. 

Emergency crews attending a scene at the Tate Modern art gallery on August 4, 2019

Emergency crews attending a scene at the Tate Modern art gallery on August 4, 2019

The council has since ordered a serious case review into the incident, which is due to be published in the autumn. 

In a victim impact statement read during a sentencing hearing, the victim’s parents described Bravery’s actions as ‘unspeakable’.

They said: ‘Words cannot express the horror and fear his actions have brought upon us and our son who now, six months on (at the time of the victim impact statement), is wondering why he’s in hospital.

‘How can one explain to a child that someone deliberately tried to kill him?

‘How can he now ever trust mankind?’

Parent’s heartbreaking statement: How can you tell a child that someone tried to kill him? All our lives are in ruins 

The act committed by this individual against our son is unspeakable.

Words cannot express the horror and the fear that his actions have brought upon us and our son. How can one explain to a child that someone deliberately tried to kill him?

How can he now ever trust mankind? How can he not see in every stranger a potential ‘villain’ who could cause him immense pain and suffering? Months of pain, fear and physiotherapy, hours and days spent without talking, without moving and without eating, away from his home, away from his friends and away from his family…

Questions about his future and his health remain unanswered, as well as these questions: ‘Will I be able to walk again?’, ‘When are we going home?’, ‘Will I go back to school, see my friends again?’

What has our life become since the attempted murder of our six-year-old son? After going through the fear of losing him, and being unable to comprehend this gratuitous and senseless act, we are now faced with numerous psychological and material problems.

Our life is in ruins. Since the day of the attack, we have not left our son’s side, following him to all the various hospitals where he has been treated. We spend our days in hospital with our son. Either one of us, or his grandmother, spends the night with him in his room on a camp bed or even a chair.

He is still in a wheelchair today, wears splints on his left arm and both of his legs, and spends his days in a corset moulded to his waist, sat in his wheelchair. He is in permanent restraint…

The nights are always extremely difficult, his sleep is very agitated, he is in pain, he wakes up many times and he cries. We have been so scared of losing him that now it is physically impossible for us to be apart from him more than a few hours, and only when we know a family member is with him…

He said to a psychiatric nurse who asked him about it that he would like to ‘slap’ the man who did this to him. We are extremely worried about the future. From what the doctors said, he has many years of physiotherapy ahead of him, and we have no prospects or plans for the future other than being by his side.

Our son is alive. He is fighting. And that’s all that matters to us. What happened on the roof of the Tate Modern that day is unforgivable. 

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