The mother of a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia urged police and mental health services to intervene hours before he brutally killed his partner, a court has heard.

Jake Neate, 37, has been charged with murder over the death of Suzanne Brown, 34, in December 2017. He stabbed her 173 times at the home they shared in Braintree, Essex.

His mother Jan became so desperate for a response when her calls for help were not acted on that she eventually contacted her son’s constituency MP and asked him to act.

Neate was ruled unfit to be tried by the court after the submission of medical reports about his condition and has not entered a plea, although the trial is going ahead. He is currently detained at Rampton psychiatric hospital in Nottinghamshire.

Judge Charles Gratwick told the jury that the trial was an unusual one.

Jan Neate was not well enough to attend the trial because of the trauma of the case. In a statement read to the court, she said that her son had abruptly come off his antipsychotic medication a few months before the killing. “I believe if his medication withdrawal had been managed properly Sue would still be with us,” she said. “Jake had never been violent before and he is or was a delicate soul.”

Allan Compton, prosecuting, told the jury that while there was little dispute about who had killed Brown in this “unusual but very tragic case” they had to assess and confirm if Neate was “physically responsible” for Brown’s death.

Jan Neate called police just after 9pm on the evening of 15 December 2017. When they arrived after midnight at the home that Brown and Jake Neate shared in Braintree, they were met with a horrific scene. Neate answered the door wearing only socks and boxer shorts and was spattered with his partner’s blood. He had stabbed her 173 times, mainly around the head, neck and shoulders, had bitten her and smashed a vase over her head.

He told police: “I know she’s dead. I stabbed her and smashed a vase over her head.”

Neate told police he had killed Brown because of his mental health problems and told them that the “immediate stoppage” of his psychiatric drugs had “fucked him up.”

“It’s brutal what I did to her,” he told police. “If this gets out into the press, will you make sure you say I’m sorry?”

Jan Neate, in her statement, said her son, an only child, had had a normal childhood but had smoked cannabis as a teenager and had become mentally ill soon after going to study geography at the University of Birmingham, which he had to leave. He had been with Brown since 2007 and the court heard that she was very devoted to him and “had the patience of a saint” looking after him when he was unwell.

He was successfully maintained on an antipsychotic called clozapine for a decade but was taken off the drug because of damage to his white blood cells. At that point, his mental health began to deteriorate sharply.

Jan Neate repeatedly raised concerns about this deterioration and left a voicemail on her son’s mental health worker’s phone the day before the fatal incident occurred.

Jan and her husband John had retired to Spain and had to raise the alarm by telephone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jake Neate, 37, of Braintree, Essex, who had been a keen angler when he was well. Photograph: Family handout

On 14 December, Jan Neate’s message to Jake Neate’s mental health worker, played in court, said: “We are so worried about Jake. I have read about clozapine and the advice is that if it’s stopped cold turkey he should be in hospital but that’s not happening. Sue is under massive pressure.”

The following evening, Brown called Jan Neate in distress, saying: “He’s hurting me.”

Jan Neate urged Brown to get out of the flat, after which she was unable to make phone contact with either of them despite calling repeatedly. After leaving another message for the mental health worker, she called the police, but the delay in their response meant they were too late to avert Brown’s death.

In desperation, when it seemed to Jan Neate that neither the police nor the mental health team were responding as quickly as she hoped they would to her calls, she twice emailed the constituency MP James Cleverly and begged him to intervene.

Police called her a few hours later in Spain to inform her and her husband John that Brown was dead.

The trial continues.