Killer went to £33k-a-year school
A RUGBY-LOVING former public schoolboy who was cleared of the knife murder and manslaughter of his friend has been named.
Joshua Molnar, who turns 18 tomorrow, stabbed Yousef Makki, 17, through the heart in March in wealthy Hale Barns, Cheshire.
His name can be reported following an order last week from trial judge Mr Justice Bryan.
Molnar harboured “idiotic fantasies” of being a middle-class gangster, but in July the jury at Manchester Crown Court found that he acted in self-defence.
Molnar, who has mild learning difficulties, was sentenced to a 16-month detention training order for perverting the course of justice and for possession of a knife. He will be freed in March.
He was educated at Ellesmere College, a £33,000-a-year boarding school whose alumni include the seventh Duke of Westminster.
He later attended the sixth form at state schoolWilmslow High which he left by mutual agreement after cannabis was found in a bag he had taken in to school. Molnar became fixated with knives, his trial heard. One detective described him and a second defendant as “rich kids who have never had to live in the real world”.
The second defendant, aged 17, who still cannot be identified, was cleared of perverting the course of justice but admitted possession of a flick knife. He was given a fourmonth detention order.Yesterday, Molnar’s business tycoon mother Stephanie, 51, said she and her ex-husband have spent “every waking hour” since the tragedy “trying to understand what we could have done better”.
She said: “The difference is that our son is still alive. It’s hard for us to think about the future but at least we have the possibility of one.
“They [Yousef’s parents] haven’t even got that chance.”
Unlike his friends,Yousef grew up on a council estate in Burnage, south Manchester.
He won a scholarship to £13,000-a-year Manchester Grammar School where he excelled academically before becoming friends with Molnar.
The trial heard he acted as a peacemaker when a row developed between him, the second boy and Molnar after all three had smoked cannabis.As the spat erupted into violence he was fatally stabbed.