A tragedy which changes nothing

Was justice done?

The three thugs who killed 16 year old Ben Kinsella were today sentenced to life in prison with a requirement that they serve a minimum of 19 years before they can be considered for parole. As Ben's sister, the actress Brooke Kinsella pointed out, nineteen years is only three years longer than young Ben was on this earth, before these animals took his life.

Nineteen years is less than half my life, and I consider myself still young, given the killers' own ages, the eldest of them will be thirty nine when he is eligible for parole, certainly young enough to take more young lives and destroy other families.

If there is any consolation, the brutes were unwise enough to take the life of a much loved child of a large and well connected East End family, and are therefore guaranteed an uncomfortable time in prison.

Ben Kinsella

Whether it was the size of his family, his sister's status as a minor TV celebrity together with family friends, such as actresses Linda Robson and Gillian Tailforth, or the dreadful unprovoked nature of the innocent young boy's murder, but Ben's killing caused a significant reaction when it happened last year.

Hundreds of teenagers marched through London

Last July hundreds of London Teenagers, all wearing white in memory of Ben, marched through London demanding an end to knife crime. An optimist, might hope that such a reaction my have some effect upon the nightmare our society is becoming, however, the almost total absence amongst the marchers of non white faces, or indeed politicians (who would have been there in force had the races of victim and killers been reversed) suggests that such hopes may be futile.

Meanwhile our government continues with the crazy policies which are adding daily to the violence and crime on our streets. How many more children must die before someone with power to change things admits how wrong they have been?

Another Lost boy, another lost son

Ben Kinsella

I had planned to use my own words to comment on today's verdict at the Old Baily, when three young men were found guilty of the unprovoked murder of 16 year old Ben Kinsella. However, nothing I could write would be as eloquent as the words of Ben's mother Deborah Kinsella, read out in court following the conviction of her son's killers.

Therefore, I shall follow the example of my friend the Green Arrow, and let the heartrending words of Ben;s mother pay tribute to her beautiful son.

Deborah Kinsella's statement:

I make this statement and the feelings and emotions are felt by all my family but no amount of words could ever express the daily pain we feel for the loss of Ben.

On 29 June 2008 our beautiful son Ben was brutally and savagely stabbed to death. We as his family have been left devastated and in total despair.

Our whole world has been totally turned upside down. Ben went for a good night out and never came home again.

Ben had only just finished school - a straight-A student, he had a job and had got his place in college (he never learnt of the wonderful exam results he had achieved and worked so very hard for).

Ben loved life, he loved living and he had so much to live for. He knew where he was going and where he wanted to be.

Ben loved nothing more than to make people laugh, he was a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky boy with a heart of gold and would do anything for anyone. A testimony of this was his funeral that was attended by so many friends who filled the church and pavements outside.

Ben loved art and wanted to be a graphic designer, he loved his family, cooking, football, music and girls.

The people who murdered him knew nothing about our Ben, not a hair on his head, a bone in his body, not anything about our wonderful son. They had never met him before or spoken to him - they just cruelly took his life away with knives for no apparent reason.

We had brought Ben up to always walk away from trouble. This sadly cost him his life. He walked away to get safely home and they took advantage of that - he was one boy on his own. It seems unfair their intent was to stab someone that night.

'Boy thing'

We were a big, happy, loving family (we are one down, one missing). We are hard-working and just wanted the best for all our children in life. There are now just three of us at home.

We have had to move house because it broke our hearts to not see Ben in his bedroom curled up sleeping and safe in his bed. We so miss Ben's love and laughter and most of all the boy thing in our family.

Ben was our precious son that we cherished and were so immensely proud of, and by the way we had brought him up.

He had values and respected everyone he met. We as a family will never know the man he would have become, the wife he would have met and the children he would have had.

We cry every day for the loss of Ben, we do not sleep like we did before

This has all now been taken away from siblings, his grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and us.

No parent or sibling should ever have to go through or see what we have seen with our son. He died in front of us, we then had to visit him in a morgue, the undertakers and finally to bury him.

We can now only visit Ben at a cemetery, our beautiful son who so loved life.

We cry every day for the loss of Ben, we do not sleep like we did before. Nearly a year on our nights are still filled with nightmares, of our son's last moments and what he went through that fatal night.

Our lives will never be the same - we have all been so deeply affected.

We as a family will never get over the loss of our Ben. We are just trying to get through it. Our family now face a lifetime of feeling this way.

Nothing we can say or do will ever bring Ben back. All we can hope and pray for is that justice will prevail, maybe then we can find some form of closure to this awful event that has devastated our family's lives.

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Ben Kinsella's killers will be sentenced tomorrow. Despite the fact that they selected Ben, a white boy, for attack "at random", even though he had no involvement in the "disrespectful look" which had angered them, the killers were not charged with a racially motivated crime.

Michael Alleyne, Jade Braithwaite and Kikka Juress

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Note Ben Kinsella should not be confused with Ben Hitchcock, who I wrote about in May, another white youth who's non-white killers were convicted less than two weeks ago.