RE-PRINTED WITH THANKS TO DAILY MIRROR
After losing their sons in stabbings two mums explain why they are determined the violence must stop and reveal a ground-breaking project they hope will make a difference.
Summer brings only painful reminders to Grace Idowu whose son David died on July 7 two years ago and Sandra Maitland-Smith whose boy Shaquille was killed a few short weeks later on August 30.
The two boys were the youngest to die in an epidemic of stabbings in the long, violent summer of 2008.
They joined a roll call of misery that included Jimmy Mizen, Rob Knox and Ben Kinsella. In total, more than 20 young people lost their lives in the capital.
“Knife crime really troubled David,” Grace says. “Just before he died, there was a 15-year-old girl, Arsema Dawit, who was stabbed near our home. He loved girls, and he couldn’t believe someone could do that. He kept saying, ‘this is stupid, Mum, we need to do something about this’. That was David.”
Shaquille was also worried. “Just before he died, I gave him some money to get school shoes but he wanted to go with me,” Sandra says.
“I said, he’s 14, he could go on his own, he was old enough, but he said he’d feel safer with me. It used to upset me, Shaquille saying he couldn’t go here or there. I used to say, you can go anywhere. No one owns anywhere. But it turned out he wasn’t safe.”
Shaquille was in a park yards from his home on a warm summer evening with his sister Tahira and a friend, when he was attacked by gang members.
David, who dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer, was stabbed in the heart while playing football in the park near his home. Both were keen football fans – Shaquille loved Man Utd, while David supported Liverpool – and both were popular, promising students.
The only motive in either case was just that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Two years on, and the two boys’ mothers still refuse to accept that the stabbing of schoolboys is now a normal part of a violent urban reality.
So both were happy to collaborate with a theatre company, Chickenshed, which is determined to make a difference.
Its ground-breaking play, Crime Of The Century, shows the stabbing of a young boy from the perspective of all involved – victims, perpetrators and mothers. Shaquille was a member of the company, and his uncle Paul Morrall is one of the directors. In the play, his cousin Daniel plays the perpetrator, and another cousin Jo-Jo plays his mother.
A speech David wrote about knife crime which he was to make two days before he was stabbed, has been incorporated into the play.
“Before Shaquille died, I was one of those people who saw knife crime on TV and didn’t think twice about it,” Jo-Jo says. “It can’t be that every family needs to lose a family member to understand – because too many people would have to die.”
It is hard on her playing a role that is so close to her own experience.
“It’s very emotional,” she says.
“But if it touches one or two people… if it makes people think, then there’s a point to it.”
The play also involves a third person who had a key perspective during the summer of 2008. He is a man that neither mother met, but someone whose emergency teams fought to save both Shaquille and David’s lives.
Dr Gareth Davies is the Medical Director of London’s Air Ambulance – which regularly attends stabbings. “I’m passionate about London,” he says, looking out from his rooftop office on the Helipad of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. “But I have to admit sometimes I get sick of what I see.”
A helicopter flew out to David, and a car from the Air Ambulance Service went straight to the roadside where Shaquille had fled his attackers.
But, both died at the Royal London Hospital.
One of the heroes honoured by the Pride of Britain Awards for his role in the July 7 bombings, Dr Davies is already – at 45 – a veteran of emergency medicine. But the growing numbers of young people being treated at the hospital for stab wounds has left him seeking real solutions to a growing problem.
“In 1993 when I started here, you didn’t really see young stab victims,” he says, as the red Air Ambulance helicopter comes in to land, bearing a critically injured patient. “Now you see stabbings in schools at playtime. It’s a younger and younger age group.”
The Air Ambulance – funded entirely by charity – attended twice as many stabbings of young people in 2008 than in 2005, and that number is still growing dramatically.
“Arguments that start in the playground turn into gang warfare,” Dr Davies says. “The knife has replaced what used to be a quick scrap. You never saw a stabbing on a Monday morning shift. It was Friday or Saturday night. Monday was heart attacks and strokes. Now you might see two stabbings at 10 and 11am. The epidemiology has changed underneath our feet. It’s not even considered abnormal any more. It’s run of-the-mill, the daytime stabbing of an adult or child. Instead of seeing it as a crime, we need to start treating it as a disease. It has a how, a when, a who and a why. We need to start asking, is it possible to immunise against it? Which age group is affected and why are they vulnerable?”
Dr Davies is so passionate about the subject that when Chickenshed, asked him for his help with their play, he felt he had no choice but to get involved.
“There is no words to describe how we feel when we’re trying to treat these patients,” Dr Davies says. “The futility of it. What it must be like to go home to that house without your son or daughter. These stabbings aren’t planned events where everyone’s out to do something. People are getting stabbed over a comment or a funny look.”
And he worries for his own sons growing up in the capital.
“I have four boys and I fear for them. I tell them, don’t get involved, just walk away. I give them the examples of what can happen if you don’t. But they’re as vulnerable as anyone else.”
Grace remembers David’s gruelling fight for life over almost three weeks with a mixture of admiration for her son’s spirit, and sorrow.
“The medical staff worked 20 days with David. I know they really did their best to save David’s life. He lost 90% of his blood. He was cut all over his body where they operated. They amputated one of his legs and then the other. Day and night they were with him.
“T h e y should have been working on someone who was sick, someone with cancer or a diabetic. These are kids with nothing wrong with them.”
Earlier this month, Crime Of The Century was performed at the 18th Century church in Hackney where Shaquille’s funeral was held.
“It was tough returning to the church, but necessary,” Sandra, his mother, says. “When there’s a funeral the community comes together – there’s a community moment and then it dies off till the next one… bringing the play back to our community is about getting everyone involved again.” Grace knows how much David would have loved the play and how proud he would be to know his words were reaching people. “He would have loved just to have been part of it all,” she says.
Sandra smiles. “If Shaquille were alive he’d be wondering what all the fuss was about – saying, what’s my picture doing on those posters?” she says.
“He was a private person but knowing it was all about him, I think he would secretly have liked that.”
RE-PRINTED WITH THANKS TO DAILY MIRROR
By Ros Wynne-Jones