Knife Crime

On Thursday July 3 2008, Shakilus Townsend, 16, of New Cross was chased, cornered and eventually stabbed by three boys and a girl armed with knives and a baseball bat. As a woman raced to his aid, she said he told her, ‘I want my mum, I don’t want to die.’ It is thought that Shakilus had run back towards the flats, thought he had lost them, then been bludgeoned by a baseball bat, slashed on his side and stabbed in the stomach. Fellow teenager, Richard Higgins, whom also came to help, thought ‘It may have been something that set off with a girl,’ whom was talking on her mobile behind them. Detective Chief Inspector Cliff Lyons depicted the murder as ‘another senseless incident in which a young life has been taken away by a knife’ and he urged witnesses to come forward. The knife crime was one of eighteen young people dead in six months. London’s deputy mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, described the deaths as ‘completely unacceptable.’