“HE took our daughter, her life, her future, and everything she could have been.
“There is no greater loss and no greater pain. His actions have left us with a lifetime of grief and it is only right that he faces the same.”
Those are the heart-wrenching words of Jenni Stancombe, the mother of murdered seven-year-old Elsie Dot, addressing the court at the sentencing of Axel Rudakubana.
It is a genuine mystery to me how any of the parents of the child victims of the Southport attack were able to so bravely sit through the harrowing evidence and to so eloquently speak out on behalf of their children.
Even as a hard-bitten old hack who has covered many a criminal trial, I struggled to hold back the tears as I read the gruesome details out loud on my radio show.
Some of the cold, hard facts hit you like a punch in the stomach: Little girls screaming and running for the door as their classmates were stabbed dozens of times.
And the killer, just hours after the attack, telling police that he was “so glad” and “happy” that he’d killed the children; smiling when he was told that his youngest murder victim, Bebe King, was just six years old.
Ticking time bomb
I remember being told before I became a mother myself that, when I was a parent, I would feel the full horror of these crimes so much more.
I didn’t believe them at the time. But they were right.
Every parent, just like me, will have had to confront the thought that it could have been THEIR child among the three little girls who died in Southport on that terrible summer’s day last year — or among the other eight children who were stabbed and the many others who managed to escape with only mental, rather than physical, scars.
We cannot begin to comprehend the anguish of the parents in grief because it is, quite simply, unimaginable. It is too unbearable a thought.
As the parents of nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar told the court: “Living without Alice is not living at all.”
While this crime is, of course, first and foremost about the victims and their families, it is also about ALL of us, about EVERY parent in this country.
It is about what we as a nation can do to prevent crimes like this from ever happening again.
Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls that day but he had wanted to kill dozens more.
His 15-minute frenzied knife rampage affected not only the families of the 26 girls in that dance class, it also left a whole community in grief and the entire country heartbroken.
We may never know Rudakubana’s true motive for sure but we do know for certain that his many victims were failed by a system that, despite his violent attacks at school, three referrals to Prevent and an obsession with violence, war and genocide, a 12-year-old choirboy turned into a violent and dangerous teen and nothing was done to stop him.
He was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. For far too long when we see violent attacks like this, with mass casualties, whether from terrorists or the mentally ill, the message is always the same: Light a candle, come together and don’t look back in anger. Love, not hate, will win in the end, they tell us.
Which is all very well, but all those verses of Kumbaya don’t seem to have made things better so far, do they?
Just as we are baffled by how American parents can endure the almost daily high school shootings in US classrooms, it would be mystifying to anyone living in Britain 20 or 30 years ago that we would put up with the knife crime in our country that is now a staple of our daily news.
A terrorist attack here, a mass stabbing there, a 14-year-old stabbed to death on a London bus one week, a 12-year-old knifed to death in Birmingham on his way home from school this week.
Yes, these awful cases are rare, but they are not rare enough.
Julia Hartley-Brewer
Same old, same old — nothing to see here. But this isn’t normal.
For how long are we expected to pretend that it is?
When are we going to stop saying prayers and start DOING something about it?
Why are deeply disturbed men being left free on the streets to take out their rage on innocent victims?
Yes, these awful cases are rare, but they are not rare enough.
And yes, Rudakubana is now behind bars, jailed for 13 life sentences with a minimum term of 52 years by the judge who said it is likely he will never be released. But we all know what will happen next.
There will be the public inquiry, more plaintive speeches by politicians, a tinkering with the laws on knives and we’ll be told “lessons will be learned”.
Until it happens again. A different knifeman, a different motive perhaps, in a different place, and different parents told that they will never see their children alive again.
Hatred in his heart
We cannot continue to live our lives just keeping our fingers crossed that it isn’t OUR child who is in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man, armed with a knife in his hand and hatred in his heart.
No parent should have to play Russian roulette when their children go to a holiday dance class, or to school or get on a bus.
No parent should have to endure the loss that the parents of Bebe, Elsie and Alice have been forced to endure.
So today, just thank your lucky stars that you weren’t sitting in that Liverpool courtroom hearing about how your child was the victim of a crazed knifeman.
Thank your lucky stars that this evening you will kiss your children goodnight as they lie safe and sound in their beds. rather than seeing them lying bloodied and cold on a morgue slab.
Thank your lucky stars that, yes, this time they were exactly that: Lucky. But what about the next time?
