Two 12-year-old boys have been found guilty of the murder of Shawn Seesahai, 19, who was killed in an apparently unprovoked machete attack in a Wolverhampton park in November.
The pair, who cannot be named because of their age, have become two of the youngest convicted murderers in the UK after jurors unanimously found them guilty on Monday.
They are believed to be the youngest defendants convicted of murder in Britain since Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both 11, were found guilty in 1993 of killing two-year-old James Bulger.
Seesahai was not known to the defendants, who claimed he antagonised them by asking them to move off a bench. One of the boys used a machete to slash at his legs and stab him through the heart, while the other reportedly punched and stamped on his head.
In an interview released after the verdicts, Seesahai’s father, Suresh Seesahai, said he felt sorry for the parents of the killers and only hoped justice had been served for his son. “This world is a different world, kids are dangerous now. If we don’t pay attention to them this will keep happening,” he said.
The court heard that Seesahai sustained injuries to his back and legs, a fractured skull and a 23cm-deep machete wound that cut through his right lung, into his heart and nearly came out of his chest.
One of the boys admitted possessing the machete used to kill Seesahai but blamed his co-defendant for stabbing the victim. Both boys denied murder and they blamed each other for the fatal injuries.
The jury was told that Seesahai and his friends “had offered no violence, nor done anything to offend” the two defendants, who had been roaming the streets with a large machete before the attack took place.
The prosecutor, Michelle Heeley KC, said: “The two boys engaged in a joint attack upon a man who had done nothing wrong, a man with no weapon, who was utterly defenceless on the ground. We say that these two boys were acting together and meant to kill Mr Seesahai; at the very least they intended to cause really serious harm. As a result of their actions, Shawn Seesahai died at the scene.”
Seesahai, originally from Anguilla in the Caribbean, was living in Handsworth in Birmingham at the time of the attack, having travelled to the UK to receive treatment for cataracts. The court heard he went to Wolverhampton on 13 November last year with friends and they were spending time on Stowlawn playing fields in the east of the city.
The two defendants were nearby, along with a female friend, and were “roaming the streets” and passing the machete between each other, the court heard. Giving evidence, one boy said Seesahai had come over to them and told them to move, before placing him in a headlock. This had triggered his friend to produce the machete, he said.
The victim’s friend told the trial he was forced to run for his life but Seesahai stumbled as he tried to flee and fell to the ground, where he was stabbed.
Giving evidence a couple of days later, the other boy denied wielding the machete and said he had been “nowhere near” the victim when he was stabbed.
One of the boys said they ran away from the scene and were given a lift home by his grandmother. At home, he used bleach to clean the machete, which he had bought for £40 from “a friend of a friend”, and hid it under his bed, he said. He was found to have 11 areas of blood staining on his clothing, while the other defendant had a small area of blood staining on his right trainer.
Jurors heard that one of the defendants had posed, wearing a mask, for a picture with the weapon hours before the killing. The boys told the court they both played video games in the hours after the attack and did not know Seesahai had died until the following day.
Phone evidence showed the boys had searched online for news articles about the attack, and one of them had searched “how many criminal records can you have to leave the country” a day after the murder.
Special arrangements were put in place for the trial due to the boys’ young age. Rather than sitting in the dock, they sat within the main courtroom alongside a family member and intermediaries who helped to explain the proceedings. Court sitting hours were reduced, with each session no longer than 40 minutes, while barristers and court staff did not wear wigs or gowns.
Jonathan Roe, the senior crown prosecutor for CPS West Midlands, said: “This was a horrifying and random act of brutality, perpetrated by two 12-year-olds who should not have been spending their time arming themselves with a machete and preparing to take a life. Shawn suffered traumatic injuries after being ruthlessly targeted by defendants who had a fixation with violence and were roaming the streets looking for a potential victim.”
The boys are expected to be sentenced on a date to be fixed in July.
