“People are dying out here,” said Renell Charles in a haunting video about knife crime filmed at his school last year.
“Innocent people are being killed, and it’s young black boys just like me.”
Eight months later, the 16-year-old Arsenal fan was killed in what police described as a brutal attack. A prosecutor said he was ambushed with a machete as he left school in Walthamstow, east London, last Friday.
On the eve of the coronation, with the nation looking the other way, the teenager was one of three people stabbed to death in separate incidents in east London over eight hours.
Wazabakana Elenda “Jordan” Kukabu, 18, was found with a stab wound to his chest near Dagenham Heathway tube station after police were called to reports of men armed with machetes, while Sebastian Zon, 27, was killed at a flat in Hackney.
The Labour MP Stella Creasy said the spate of stabbings showed that the “epidemic” of youth crime needed urgent action.
“No family should have to deal with the pain of losing a child, let alone to do so at the hands of another – yet across the country many are and many more are living with the epidemic of youth and violent crime that we are facing,” said Creasy.
“We have to ask how much more death and serious harm it will take before the government recognises that this is a crisis which needs urgent action – and that this action needs to go beyond stop and search to asking how we ensure every young person has the mental health and mentoring support they need.
“If we don’t we could end up with a lost generation of young people who think carrying a knife is the only way to stay alive.”
Knife crime is a complex issue. In recent years, there has been growing acceptance that societal factors are its driving forces.
A study titled Young People and Street Crime, commissioned by the Youth Justice Board across 32 London boroughs, illustrated that when other relevant social and economic factors were taken into account, race and ethnicity had no significance at all.
And while it is too early to know exactly what was behind these stabbings, it has left families bereft.
Renell, known affectionately as Renz, was allegedly chased before being stabbed in the chest and back with a machete outside Kelmscott school, where he was a promising pupil preparing to sit his GCSEs.
A memorial of flowers, an Arsenal shirt, and Renell’s favourite snacks, including packets of Skittles and cartons of KA fruit juice, now mark the spot where he collapsed and died outside a bike shop.
A shopkeeper described seeing Renell’s distraught mother arriving at the scene minutes later. “She was kissing his face when his body was here. But she wasn’t able to say even a single word,” he said.
The man, who did not want to be named, added: “The police did CPR but he was gone.”
In the video filmed last September, Renell spoke candidly about how crime had robbed him of friends, saying: “And it’s young black boys just like me.”
“We deserve a chance to show that not all black boys are just tough, hard gangsters,” he added, dressed in his school uniform.
His words were filmed by the artist and youth worker Kay Rufai, as part of the SMILE-ing Boys Project, an eight-week programme which aims to address the mental health needs of black teenage boys.
The acclaimed film-maker said Renell was “super intelligent” with an “incredible level of emotional maturity”. In their first meeting, Rufai said he asked the teenager, who was then 15, to write his feelings down on a piece of paper.
“The first thing he wrote was: ‘Trapped in a cycle and I really am trying so hard to get out,’” Rufai said. “I was so just taken by him, by his honesty, by his sense of introspection, and his desire to do so much to extricate himself from the proximity of things that often didn’t have positive outcomes.”
Renell’s headteacher, Sam Jones, also paid tribute to the teenager as he said the attack marked the “darkest of days”.
“Renell was a bright, capable, charming, talented, popular, charismatic young man who had great potential. His smile lit up the room. It is heartbreaking to know that this potential will now not be realised,” he said. “I readily admit that I am still in a state of shock, disbelief, anger, upset, regret and a myriad of other emotions.”
Jordan Kukabu’s uncle Michel Pongo, a Labour councillor in Barking and Dagenham, said his family were in shock at their personal tragedy.
“It was with great sadness that this afternoon I learned that my nephew, Jordan, 18, had been stabbed to death in Dagenham last night. His mother is inconsolable,” he tweeted on Saturday. He also made a plea to those who carry weapons, writing: “Drop your knife ... before it is too late.”
Hours after Renell was attacked, and a few miles east, Jordan was found stabbed on Parsloes Avenue, near Dagenham Heathway tube station. Police said they were called just before midnight to reports of men armed with machetes.
People leaving a pub looked on in disbelief.
A man, who lives in a terrace house near where Jordan later died, added: “I heard police sirens around midnight. I saw there was a taxi car here and there was blood over it and the person was on the floor, collapsed. The police were here by then and they were giving him chest compressions. The police did their best, they did it for about a good half an hour.”
Other neighbours said Jordan’s family had laid flowers at the spot where he died. A photograph of the teenager was also attached to a nearby tree.
In another incident that happened before midnight, Sebastian Zon, 27, was found with a stab wound at a flat in Mare Street, Hackney.
Challenged by Creasy at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Rishi Sunak said that knife and serious youth violence had fallen in recent years.
And according to ONS figures, there has been a dip. Knife crime in England and Wales fell by 9% in January to December 2022 compared with April 2019 to March 2020, according to its statistics. Meanwhile, hospital admissions in England and Wales for young people aged 24 and under due to assault by a sharp object fell by 10% in January to December 2022 compared with the same period in 2021.
But Sunak acknowledged the government must do everything it can to tackle youth violence.
On Thursday, a 16-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, appeared at the Old Bailey charged with Renell’s murder.
Four people have been charged with Jordan’s murder, three of them teenagers.
A 52-year-old man was charged with the murder of Zon.
