by Janet, 65, clearly remembers the evening her 11-year-old granddaughter came to her house last year and said she saw someone receiving CPR on the playground from her front door.
They were shocked to learn that a 19-year-old man, Shawn Seesahai, had been murdered there. They were even more horrified when they discovered that the two actors were only 12 years old.
“It’s not realistic to think they can do it. You think children their age should be playing. You don’t expect a 12-year-old to cause injuries like he did,” she said.
Janet, who asked not to be named, said one of the boys convicted was a known troublemaker who had been terrorizing the neighborhood for months, often roaming the streets in the early hours of the morning.
“He would throw bricks at windows, or snowballs at windows when it was winter. It’s a lot quieter now,” she said. “We didn’t feel safe going out when we knew it was coming – we used to walk the dog in the park but we stopped doing that because of him. I would never go out after dark.”
The behavior was out of character for this area of Wolverhampton, locals said. The streets of semi-detached houses are mostly quiet, with well-kept gardens and neighbors chatting in the street.
At around 3pm, children from the local primary school filter out of the playground and across the playing field where Seesahai lost his life last November. Dog walkers pass the bench which is said to have been chased by boys brandishing a 42.5cm long machete.
There were some problems with teenagers congregating on this grassy area, however. “Especially on the weekends, we get a lot of people hanging around that park. There is always a group of people here or on the bench. Sometimes very young, sometimes older. There are always broken bottles left behind,” said Parmbir Singh, 28.
Alarms are growing about the number of young people carrying knives on the streets. Knife-related crime increased by 8% in the West Midlands from 2022 to 2023, with numbers rising nationally since the pandemic.
Malachi Nunes runs Ambitious Lives, a mentoring program for young people at risk of violence across the West Midlands. He said he had worked with children as young as nine in Wolverhampton who were carrying weapons, and said that “a 12-year-old today is thinking like an 18-year-old”.
“I was mentoring a nine-year-old boy from Wolverhampton who was afraid he would get involved in rival gangs because he had a brother in a gang,” he said. “A lot of young people have a kill or be killed mentality. I think it’s a case of survival.”
He said the ready availability of such weapons made them “fashion statements”. “There are people on Snapchat posting that they are selling Rambo knives for £40, or there are also WhatsApp groups,” he said. “It’s like: ‘Do you have one?’ ‘I have one.’ ‘Do you have the guts to carry it?’ A lot of this is done on social media.”
For staff at the Way Youth Zone in Wolverhampton, the city’s main youth service provider serving 85 to 150 young people every evening, it’s why getting children away from screens at home and into a safe space after time is so important. school.
“We try to proactively discourage people from using social media while they’re here, and especially with the juniors we try to keep them off Instagram and TikTok,” said the charity’s chief executive, Paul Snape.
“The need for youth centers is absolutely essential and that’s not just about tackling knife crime, it’s about giving young people the opportunities they deserve and should have.”
Nikita Kanda, 24, whose brother Ronan, 16, was stabbed and killed not far from her front door in 2022, said Seesahai’s murder was “opening people’s eyes” to how these incidents can happen where at all.
The family lives less than three miles from where Seesahai was murdered, on an equally ordinary residential street where the violence that took Ronan’s life came out of the blue.
Parbjeet Veadhesa, then 16, killed him with a 55cm long ninja sword he ordered online using his mother’s ID to go through security checks. He had collected a cache of 30 weapons, selling them to friends at school.
The Ronans believe an obsession with large weapons as a status symbol is fueling knife crime murders, and are campaigning to ban all bladed weapons from being sold online.
“People might say, well, they can use a kitchen knife, but it’s more about the culture of these weapons. [Veadhesa] He had nothing to do with Russell Hobbs kitchen knives, did he? He was obsessed with big knives,” said Nikita.
In Seesahai’s case, the weapon was a black machete, bought by one of the boys from a friend of a friend, who he would not name. One of the boys posed for a photo with him hours before the killing, wearing a mask.
“You can see kids 12, 13, 14 influencing each other a lot, for example with vaping. The same kind of things will happen with machetes and knives,” said Nikita. “Maybe that 12-year-old brought it [the machete] into the school. He could have gone and shown his friends, ‘look what I’ve got’. And they’ll say ‘oh I want to get one now, it’s so cool’.
“How many other kids are doing this now? How many other children have these weapons in their rooms?”
