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Brooke Kinsella with mourners honouring her brother Ben |
Trials of Kinsellas after Ben stabbing
The sister of knife victim Ben Kinsella has written a moving account of her family’s ordeal following the teenager’s brutal murder, writes Peter Gruner
Why Ben? By Brooke Kinsella.
Simon & Schuster,
WHY Ben? by former EastEnders actress Brooke Kinsella is a book so full of anger and pain that there were times I had to put it down because it was overwhelming.
It is the true heartfelt story of the short life and cruel murder of Brooke’s younger
brother Ben, 16, who was stabbed to death on a street in Holloway in the early hours of a Sunday morning in June last year.
The book’s blistering pages are a celebration of Ben, by all accounts a likeable young man with a cheeky sense of humour, but also an attack on Britain’s legal system which, in Brooke’s eyes, appears to bend over backwards to support the defendant.
She tells how young witnesses bravely agreed to give evidence against the three accused, despite threats of revenge. Brooke says they were promised that only their first names would be used, but in the event they were fully identified in court.
Ben was at Shillibeers pub off the North Road, celebrating the end of his GCSEs, when he became the innocent
victim of an argument between a group of young men.
He was chased along the street with other youngsters and stabbed to death when he stopped running. He was knifed 11 times in five seconds.
The killers, Juress Kika, 19, Jade
Braithwaite, 18, and Michael Alleyne, 20, were given life custody with minimum terms of 19 years for Ben’s murder at the Old Bailey.
The book is the stuff of nightmares because it tells the story of a very ordinary and loving
family suddenly caught up in a maelstrom.
Colleagues on this paper who reported on the murder of Ben and met members of the family, including Brooke, are full of admiration for their enormous strength in the face of such a terrible tragedy.
The book begins with Ben working in an internet café and Brooke, ever the caring big sister, bringing him a lunch-time snack. Brooke writes: “I decided to leave him in peace and gave him a kiss, which he quickly wiped off and followed up with a dirty look for
embarrassing him [in front of customers]. It was the last time I would ever see my brother alive.”
At 2.30am the next morning Brooke got a phone call from her sister Jade to say that Ben had been stabbed.
The family quickly assembled at the hospital. Brooke writes that her parents George and Deborah looked like they had suddenly aged 100 years.
A surgeon appeared to say that Ben was critical but still alive.
However, he had lost a large amount of blood. He had a 50-50 chance of survival, which gave the family hope.
George and Deborah were preparing to go and sit by their son’s bedside and will him to survive when a nurse came to say that Ben’s kidneys had begun to
deteriorate. Brooke writes: “Ten minutes later they were back with the words that will haunt us forever: ‘We’re really sorry but we think he is going to die. You’d better come.’”
More than 1,000 attended Ben’s funeral at St John’s church in Duncan Terrace, Angel. But it wasn’t a morbid affair. They played Ben’s favourite music and mourners were asked not to wear black but to arrive in their brightest colours and funny sunglasses and wigs.
The family coped with their terrible loss by launching a nationwide campaign against knife crime. Twenty-seven teenagers were knifed to death in London last year. The year before Ben’s murder there were 277 deaths from knives in England and Wales – the highest for 30 years.
Nothing could prepare the Kinsella family for the trial of Ben’s attackers.
Brooke is particularly critical of some members of the defendants’ families who were not prepared to show any “remorse or shame or even embarrassment”.
She writes: “What I didn’t expect was the intimidation, the violence and the pure nastiness that certain members of their families put us through.”
Brooke could understand a family member not wanting to believe the worst of a defendant. “But to physically attack my friends and family, to spit on them and call them ‘scum’ and other disgusting names, to sing ‘who let the dogs out’ as we walked by, to have the audacity to tell my dad to ‘walk away and have respect’ – this I could never, ever understand.”
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