Yousef Makki was killed by his friend Joshua Molnar. Although pals, they were boys from very different backgrounds.
Yousef was from a humble family in Burnage. He was stabbed through the heart by Molnar, the privately educated son of wealthy parents from Hale, on a leafy lane in affluent Hale Barns on March 2, 2019. Both were 17.
Molnar, now 20, was acquitted of murder and manslaughter following a trial later in 2019, telling the jury he had acted in self-defence. He was cleared unanimously but he was handed a 16-month detention and training order after admitting possessing the knife which inflicted the fatal injury and lying to police at the scene.
READ MORE : Shocking police body-cam footage which shows lies of the rich teen who stabbed to death his friend
Former Cheadle Hulme School pupil Molnar stabbed Yousef after a row over a cannabis deal that went wrong, the trial was told. It ended the promising life of Yousef, a straight-A student who dreamed of becoming a heart surgeon.
It was also the nadir of Molnar’s descent from the privileged life of independent schools, designer gifts and expensive holidays he had enjoyed as the son of two successful Hale entrepreneurs. During his trial, the media were prevented from naming Molnar - the law seeks to protect children who come before the courts.
But that changed in June 2019 when he turned 18, and became a young adult. It meant he could be named for the first time. Yousef’s death and Molnar’s convictions were highly unusual for the country’s courts because it was knife crime that happened against a backdrop of privilege.
Yousef was the academically gifted boy who won a bursary to one of the country's best independent schools, Manchester Grammar School. Molnar was his friend from leafy Hale who wanted for nothing.
By the time Josh Molnar fell out with Yousef, he had left a series of schools and his relationship with his family was strained. Against a backdrop of increasing cannabis use, he began living what his own lawyer described as the double, fantasy life of a juvenile, ‘middle class gangster’, ‘playing around with knives’ and getting into fights.
As the son of prominent business people Mark and Stephanie Molnar, so much more was expected of him. Molnar’s father Mark, a maths graduate, was a company director and business consultant, while his mother, Stephanie, co-founded of a chain of Cheshire nurseries.
At the age of 15 Joshua Molnar began using cannabis. He was not an academic high achiever like his friend Yousef Makki. He saw himself as the class clown.
It was on the rugby field, in school teams and with Altrincham Kersal RFC, where he played for their winning U-16 side, where he expressed himself, and found vent for his aggressive streak. He took to carrying a knife. He told his trial it was to protect himself from muggings, and because of peer pressure.
“If I had a pretty cool knife I would show it off a bit,” he told his trial.
Exactly a year before Yousef died, Molnar was a guest at a party. Held at a £1m property, there was security at the gated entrance and youngsters from Greater Manchester’s independent schools made up the guests.
When a fight broke out Molnar, his trial heard, punched another boy before stepping back and pulling out a knife from his waistband. Molnar denied having had a knife at this party in his trial.
But young prosecution witnesses would testify that he seemed to take pleasure in taking out a kitchen knife and - saying nothing - watching as the room fell silent in fear. Throughout his evidence, Josh Molnar described knives as ‘cool’.
He was just five when he left his first private school, Hale Preparatory School, after a show of ‘aggressive behaviour’, the M.E.N. reported following the trial. A source close to the family said at the time he had never been expelled from any school and that he had left Hale Preparatory School because he had 'struggled with their teaching methods'.
From there he was moved to Bollington Primary School in Altrincham, where he was 'very happy', the source said. But his secondary school career was troubled.
At the £12,000-a-year Cheadle Hulme School, he was considered by some as a flash bully - they recall mundane, high school stuff, like him barging into pupils he didn’t like in the corridors and publishing pictures on his social media of his latest designer purchase.
During his time at CHS he struggled academically, his parents got divorced, and, a source close to his family said at the time, he 'suffered series of family bereavements'. He left when he was asked to repeat Year 9.
As he got older it seemed he was embarrassed by his comfortable background and determined to kick against it. The showy pictures stopped, replaced by pictures of cannabis. He sold his designer clothes and started wearing tracksuits.
From there, his parents sent him to Ellesmere College, a boarding school in Shropshire. In its guide to public schools, writers at society magazine Tatler describe themselves as 'big fans' of Ellemere's approach.
The school has a strong focus on sport and nurturing pupils who aren’t naturally academic high-flyers. Molnar played rugby for the first team and got six GCSEs, before leaving Ellesmere to be closer to home and moving on to a state comprehensive, Wilmslow High School.
He ended up leaving Wilmslow High - 'by mutual consent' - after cannabis was found in his Hugo Boss bag. It had been stolen from him and when it was found drugs were inside, a source close to his family said.
Molnar would tell friends that at times he had run away from home and talked of sleeping in his mother’s car, telling his subsequent trial, pointedly, that while he could pick his friends, ‘I don’t always get on with my family’.
A source close to the family said neither of his parents was aware he had ever run away from home, and that they ‘don’t recall’ him ever sleeping in his mother’s Alfa Romeo. Any suggestion that he had been allowed to go off the rails, the source said, was 'complete nonsense'.
However, selfie videos, where he acted out violent scenarios, charted his descent into what his own trial lawyer would call ‘idiotic fantasies’, fuelled by a love of drill music which glorified the use of knives.
He filmed himself with a machete in the mirror of his bedroom, sniggering as he made violent stabbing motions towards another boy, the point of the blade coming just a few centimetres from his face.
The other boy makes stabbing movements towards Molnar with his own knife as both laugh. Another clip shows Molnar using a lit firework to light a spliff before tossing it over his shoulder to explode near a car.
The soundtrack is a drill tune by Next Up, with lyrics like, “Back out my shank (knife) and dip it, ballistic; Push in my shank and twist it.”
Molnar shot another video where he appeared to make slashing movements across the throat of someone in the distance, with a machete, before poking the blade into a mattress.
Then, on March 2 2019, he stabbed somebody for real; his friend Yousef Makki, through the heart, on Gorse Bank Road in leafy Hale Barns, an act the jury accepted, by their verdicts, was self-defence.
Yousef, 17, was a pupil at Manchester Grammar School. Unlike Molnar, his parents would never have been able to afford independent school without financial help. The knife that killed Yousef was delivered with enough force that the hilt went into his chest, inflicting a 12cm deep wound which went right through his heart.
Molnar’s trial heard he blamed a third boy, Adam Chowdhary, for arranging the ill-fated drug deal, and he claimed Yousef had taunted him, calling him a ‘pussy’.
"I can't remember if Yousef laughed a bit or said something but I got more annoyed," Molnar told jurors.
He admitted he pushed Yousef after the jibe, and said Yousef answered with a punch. As Molnar put it in his trial: “I was just kind of a bit confused. I wasn’t really expecting it.
"And then I have looked up and Yousef is quite annoyed at me at this point. I believe I saw him, he had taken his knife out. And he looked like he was going to hit me again, saying ‘c’mon, c’mon’."
Yousef, he said, would not back down from a confrontation, and he ‘just didn’t want to get beaten up again’.
Feeling ‘quite on edge’, “I have started to take a knife out of my pocket”, he said. “I just wanted to warn him off, trying to get him to leave me alone.”
Asked how the knife ended up ‘inside Yousef’, he said: “Not really. I do not know what I did. I don’t know how it all came together.”
In the aftermath, Molnar described how he made an attempt to help Yousef, taking off his top and using it to try and stem the bleeding. But he also threw the blade into a bush and lied that the knifeman must have been in a car, a VW Polo, that he claimed had driven away from the scene of the stabbing.
Sentencing him, the judge Mr Justice Bryan told Molnar: “The backdrop to your offending is depressingly all too familiar. A warped culture whereby the possession of knives is considered to be ‘cool’ and ‘aesthetically pleasing’, and knives are routinely carried on our streets.
“Mix that with youth as well as drugs and drug dealing, as in the present case, and it is a recipe for disaster and the tragic, but all too predictable, events that unfolded on the early evening of 2 March 2019, with the loss of the young life of your friend Yousef Makki who had everything to live for, and the irreparable harm that resulted, which has changed the lives of his family and friends for ever.”
Molnar's mother Stephanie released this statement when her son's anonymity elapsed: "Circumstances on the night of 2 March led to our son Joshua accidentally killing his friend Yousef with a knife whilst defending himself against a knife.
“He was found not guilty to the charges of murder and manslaughter, based on self-defence, in a unanimous verdict. The events of that night were a tragedy.
"These were three friends going out on a Saturday. They should all still be here to lead fulfilling lives but they are not. The jury heard the evidence over a four-week trial.
"Every single one of the twelve members of the jury, diverse in age, ethnicity, gender and background, felt not guilty was the right verdict based purely on the evidence.
“We fully support all the positive steps to celebrate Yousef’s life and anything positive in the future that can come from this tragedy is something we would welcome and contribute to in whatever way possible.”
