It was Kiyan Prince’s older sister Tannisa who took the teatime phone call
last May. Her 15-year-old brother, a muscular, talented footballer who was
already on the youth team at Queens Park Rangers, had been stabbed outside
the gates of his north London school, one of Tony Blair’s flagship city
academies, just as classes ended.
Intervening to break up a “play fight” between two schoolboys, Kiyan, regarded
by teachers as a natural leader, was unexpectedly knifed by one of them. As
he lay bleeding on the ground, pupils milling around, he pleaded: “Don’t let
me die”. But according to some reports his 16-year-old assailant stabbed him
one last time in the arm, muttering “Don’t grass me up”, before fleeing
through the nearby tower blocks.
Tannisa, then 18, was babysitting one of the youngest children of her father’s
new family in his terraced house in Enfield when the news came through.
“She was hysterical,” recalls her father, the former boxer Mark Prince. “I
knew it was serious straight away.” By the time they reached the Royal
London hospital in east London to which Kiyan had been airlifted – Prince
desperately trying to stay calm as they rushed through the traffic – the
schoolboy’s life hung in the balance. Two hours after the attack he died:
from a stab wound to the chest.
When the doctor finally came out of the operating theatre and said “I’m
sorry”, Prince admits he went to pieces. He screamed, leapt up and punched
the wall so hard he had to have his hand x-rayed there and then. Furious,
grieving and frustrated, he tried to find out where the killer lived. “I
wanted the address,” he says.
“The emotion was so strong . . . it’s as though there’s a hand inside my chest
twisting up my belly and heart.”
Last week Hannad Hasan, a Somali refugee, now 17, was found guilty of Kiyan’s
murder: sentence is expected later this month. It was the third trial the
family had endured.
The first jury failed to reach a verdict. Hasan initially admitted
manslaughter, but denied murder – he had told police he had intended to give
Kiyan “just a little scratch” with the knife. He also told police he was
sorry: “I know how my mum would feel, so I know how his mum would feel as
well.”
The second trial collapsed after the distraught Prince approached a juror, an
impulsive act that infuriated Kiyan’s mother, nursery nurse Tracy
Cumberbatch, though the pair have since patched up their differences.
“I felt the jurors weren’t doing their job right,” he explains. He was
particularly unhappy because he felt that witnesses, including his son’s
best friend, who tried to help Kiyan as he lay dying, were being asked to
repeat evidence, prolonging the ordeal.
But the final verdict, he says, has finally brought the family some peace. Did
he want Hasan convicted of murder? “Definitely,” he asserts, lifting his
head to look me in the eyes. His son’s killer, he says, “used a knife like
you use a pen”.
Within minutes this giant of a man is in tears. Sitting on the sofa of his
home, a memorial book to Kiyan stuffed with pictures and tributes beside
him, his son’s blue and white QPR shirt draped over the arm, a flat-pack
kitchen still in boxes months after it was bought, he breaks down when he
starts to remember Kiyan’s last words. “I know he called . . .” he trails
off and his head slumps down again.
It’s been a bad year for knife and gun crime in Britain’s cities with London’s
boroughs, in particular, becoming virtual killing fields. Kiyan died shortly
before a nation-wide knife amnesty, during which nearly 90,000 weapons were
handed in. None-theless, since his murder, many more youngsters have died
violently.
Just at the end of last month Martin Dinnegan, 14, was fatally stabbed in
Islington, north London, after getting into an argument with a gang of
youngsters and apparently “looking at someone the wrong way”. A few days
earlier Ben Hitchcock, 16, who’d just finished his GCSEs, died after being
attacked by a gang in Kent. On the same day Annaka Pinto, 17, was gunned
down in Tottenham, north London.
Go back further and even an incomplete list is terrifyingly long: Anton Hyman,
17, Adam Regis, 15, Kodjo Yenga, 16, Billy Cox, 15, Michael Dos-unmu, 15,
Adam Regis, 15, Danielle Johnson, 17, Paul Erhahon, 14, James Andre
Smartt-Ford, 16, Jevon Henry, 18, Kashif Mahmood, 16, Charlotte Polius, 15.
Last May when Kiyan’s death at the London Academy school in Edgware first made
the headlines I remember thinking: “Dear God, this is so close to where we
live.” Like anyone with teenage children living in the capital, I found
myself urging them not to intervene in playground or street fights, to walk
away from volatile situations, never to consider carrying a knife, even –
especially not – for self-defence. And as I worried over them, I wondered
what kind of citizens I was teaching them to be.
Kiyan doesn’t seem to have been the kind of boy to walk away from helping
people. He was a role model for his friends: 750 people attended his funeral
and the tributes have come thick and fast. Gianni Paladini, chairman of QPR,
described him as “one of our brightest young talents”, his London Academy
head teacher, Phil Hearne, said he was “a lovely young man”. Another of his
teachers called him “a gorgeous teenager . . . very popular and well liked”.
“It was typical of Kiyan to get involved when he thought a friend might be in
trouble, because he was a caring and confident young man,” says his father.
Although Prince was just 21 when Kiyan was born, and no longer lives with
Tracy – he’s since married and has several younger children – the bond
between father and son was strong. They worked out together, ate together,
prayed together.
His memories of his son are vivid: the moment when Kiyan “whupped my ass at
Pro Evolution Soccer [a PlayStation football game] for the first time”, the
way he would put the speaker phone on when a girl called, the fact that he
thought of himself as “a bit of a singer”, and the video clip of him shadow
boxing, just like his dad.
Friends say that Prince fell apart a little after his son’s death: he put on
weight, stopped working out, found his work as a youth project leader a
strain.
Now, though, he is trying to turn his grief into something positive. Rising to
his feet, he slots a CD into the player. Rap lyrics drift through the
speakers. Put the Knives and Guns Down (words partly based on lyrics Prince
wrote) is released next month: profits will go to the foundation that
Kiyan’s parents are setting up to try to reach youngsters before they turn
to violence and to fund and start youth projects.
“My son was a role model and I feel like Kiyan’s saying to me, ‘Don’t just
grieve, don’t just feel the pain. Go out there and see if you can manage to
get more role models for young people.’ I am committed to doing that,” says
his father.
But he’s angry, too, and voices a widespread feeling among parents that
politicians and the police are not taking the escalation of violent crime
among youngsters as seriously as they should be. Even after Kiyan’s death
Prince’s younger daughter, just 13, was threatened with being stabbed at her
school.
After the trial the family released a statement: “Knife crime will continue to
rise in numbers unless this government begins to take this knife crime
seriously by coming down hard on the potential murderers, because that’s
what a person carrying a knife is.”
“Things are going to be as bad as in America soon,” says Prince. “It’s
spilling out of places like Hackney and Tottenham and it’s affecting
everyone.” He partly blames the influence of violent music, films and
computer games: he also wants parents to be as vigilant of their teenagers
as they are of younger children.
Certainly, many of the squabbles and animosities seem to start at school where
there are growing concerns that the policy of allowing disturbed and
maladjusted children to mingle freely with the rest of the school population
is a deeply dangerous one. (Although some schools are now using airport-style
scanners to frisk pupils for weapons, still the stabbings continue.)
Away from the trial, lawyers revealed that Hasan, who was suspended from the
London Academy at the time of the attack, had reportedly amassed 23
misconducts. The background reports had to be kept from jurors because of a
technical failure to file them in time but Hasan had apparently been
expelled for urinating in front of a teacher and threatening to smash her
face in. Temporary exclusions are on the rise in state schools, while
permanent ones are frowned on.
As Hearne, Kiyan’s head teacher, said last May: “Someone somewhere has to take
the lead on knife crime but where is that leadership coming from? We are
happy to tackle unhealthy eating in schools, but which is the more dangerous
– a Turkey Twizzler or a knife? How many people have to die before someone
takes this seriously?”
For further information about Mark Prince’s campaign, visit www.kiyanprince.org
