Two 12-year-old boys were convicted of fatally stabbing an unknown person in a Wolverhampton park with a machete.
Both males attempted to place the blame for Shawn Seesahai’s murder on the other during the trial. The jury unanimously found both of them guilty of the crime.
They are thought to be the youngest boys in the UK to have killed someone with a knife.
The youths are also believed to be the youngest children to have been found guilty of murder since Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both aged 11, were found guilty in 1993 of killing two-year-old James Bulger.
A month-long trial at Nottingham Crown Court was told Mr Seesahai was shoulder-barged by the smaller of the two defendants, who ‘often’ carried a machete with a 42.5 cm long blade, before being punched, kicked, stamped on, and ‘chopped’ at with the weapon.
The victim’s friend told the trial he was forced to run for his life, but 19-year-old Mr Seesahai stumbled as he tried to flee from the boys on Wolverhampton’s Stowlawn playing fields on November 13 last year.
The victim was hit with such vigour, according to what the court heard, that the machete nearly went through his torso in one strike.
Mr Seesahai was pronounced dead at 9.11 pm on November 13 last year after police were called to the scene at 8.37 pm.
Mr Seesahai had travelled to the UK with friend Deron Harrigan, primarily because he needed cataract surgery, which was unavailable on Anguilla. He settled in Handsworth, Birmingham, and jurors heard the pair travelled to Wolverhampton that November evening with a third man, Jamal Clarke because Mr Clarke wanted to visit his girlfriend in the city.
Prosecutor Michelle Heeley KC said Shawn and his friend ended up in a confrontation with the two killers – who had been ‘roaming the streets’ with the machete – while killing time wandering through Stowlawn playing fields as Mr Jamal visited his partner.
Prosecutors say the two 12-year-olds, acted together to kill Mr Seesahai after he ‘shoulder-brushed’ them by a bench.
Mr Harrigan told jurors how he had run for his life after the two boys launched the attack with the blade, and turned around to see his friend on the floor and fatally wounded.
Having been left traumatised by the ordeal, he returned to Anguilla after the murder and gave evidence from the island via a video link. The witness said: ‘It was a big blade, something similar to a machete. He pulled it out of the sheath from his waist. Shawn told me to run.’
The witness said that as the pair ran, Mr Seesahai tripped and was attacked.
Prosecutor Michelle Heeley KC said the victim had ‘offered no violence and ‘done nothing to offend the two boys’. A girl at the scene with the youths said she saw the boys ‘punching’ and ‘kicking’ their victim as he lay on the floor. It was not ‘unusual’ that the boy who admitted possessing the knife had a machete as he ‘often’ carried it, she claimed.
The defendants said the confrontation began when Mr Seesahai told them to move from the park bench they were sitting on, then got the boy who owned the knife in a headlock.
As the jury convicted both boys guilty of murder and one guilty of having a bladed weapon, relatives of the victim and the defendants sobbed and embraced in the public gallery.
This is horrifying and does not bode well for our country.
Parents are not held accountable for their children’s behaviour, and we now treat all children with kid gloves. There is no punishment before it’s too late. Parents should have the right to punish their children in whatever way they decide, not the way the government decides. These children do not belong to the parents anymore, they have no control, and our nanny state has control of them – parents have no rights at all. This is why children are going off the rails and doing what they want, when they want.
When I was growing up and I did something wrong, and God forbid I was brought home by the police, my parents would give me a good hiding in front of the policeman. More disruptive children would get an hour in a police cell just so they could get a snippet of what it would be like locked up all day. For most, it would scare the living daylights out of our children, but some fell through the cracks. Now we are told to just say no to our children and that should be enough, but it’s not enough, and parents should be allowed to punish their children how they see fit, otherwise, things will get far worse.
How did these kids get their hands on such potentially harmful weapons in the first place? When will our government acknowledge that it has granted youngsters excessive latitude? Reintroduce the cane to schools and allow parents to discipline their kids as they deem appropriate.
I’ll go back to the late 1980’s. My children had gone off to school. They must have been about 5 or 6 years old at the time. I was off out to visit a friend and I noticed a young boy of about the same age who lived at the end of his road with his mother and her boyfriend. I came out of my door and he looked at me and promptly called me a ‘slut’. I promptly said that his mother should wash his mouth out with soap and he said ‘If she does that I’ll get the police and social services onto her’.
‘Watch this space’ I thought to myself. Things are going to get worse, and they have!
Children wielding machetes—who would have guessed? Even though the police are aware of this, they take no action, and if children are capable of this at such a young age, how much worse will they be as adults?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 