Mum has died of a broken heart. Yousef’s killer should have TWO lives on his conscience
She fought for justice after her brilliant son was stabbed to death. Now her daughter reveals a shattering legacy...
WHEN Debbie Makki’s daughter was shown into the hospital room where her mother had died, her first feeling was not of grief, but relief.
She knew Debbie was finally at peace, reunited with her beloved teenage son, her pride and joy. The past 14 months had been a living hell, since Yousef — a brilliantly clever council estate boy who made his family hugely proud by winning a bursary to attend a prestigious private school — died after being stabbed through the heart.
Debbie was forced not only to suffer the agony of her 17-year-old son being stabbed but to watch as the boy accused of killing him was cleared of murder and manslaughter, serving a sentence of just 16 months for admitting perverting the course of justice and possession of a knife. A second boy, whose family is from the same wealthy Greater Manchester area as the first, and who bought and supplied the knife which inflicted the fatal wound, received a four-month custodial sentence for admitting possessing a knife.
Although Debbie’s death, aged 55, appears to have been caused by sepsis, her family are in no doubt that what really killed her was a broken heart. They feel that these boys should now have two deaths on their consciences.
‘For the first time since Yousef’s death, Mum, still in the intensive care bed in which she died, looked at peace,’ says Debbie’s daughter, Jade Akoum, 29, her voice cracking as she gives her first interview since her mother’s death on May 24.
‘I’m sure she must have felt relief that all the hurt, pain and injustice she faced daily is finally over for her.
‘Since Yousef’s death she had been a shell of her previous self — broken, sad and frustrated by the injustice of it all — so their actions have led to two losses now.’
But there were, after a year of misery, brief flickers of hope in Debbie’s life before she died. Firstly, her grandson Raafat, the eldest of Jade’s three boys, was awarded a bursary at the £13,000-a-year Manchester Grammar School, where Yousef had also won a place years earlier.
The ten-year-old’s success is all the more moving because he was tutored by his uncle Yousef, who’d recognised in him the same enquiring mind and fierce intelligence that fired his own ambition. Raafat is now determined to be a heart surgeon, just like Yousef always wanted to be.
‘Mum was so happy that her grandson got into the school that Yousef loved so much,’ says Jade. ‘She knew he would excel. Raafat says he wants to do what Yousef didn’t have the chance to do and become a heart surgeon — he’s doing it for himself, but he’s doing it in memory of Yousef, and now my mum.’
Yet even this joy is tinged with awareness of the family’s tragedy.
‘Of course, after what happened to Yousef, we’re worried about the company he might keep — there are so many wealthy kids with time on their hands, a lot of money and parents who aren’t always around to watch them as much as we do — but I will just have to keep my eye on him.’
JADE had more happy news for her mother, too: she and her husband Mazen, 32, have just found out they’re having another baby at the end of the year. If it’s a boy, he will be called Yousef.
‘Mum was really emotional and said: “I’d love that”,’ Jade recalls. ‘We all miss calling out that name, and she said it would mean we could do so in a positive way, without all the sadness now associated with it.’
Debbie — who considered it an injustice that Joshua Molnar, the boy accused of killing Yousef, was only convicted of lesser charges — was determined to carry on fighting to bring a civil case against Molnar.
Jade says: ‘Only two weeks ago she told me: “If, for whatever reason, I’m no longer around, I want you to continue the campaign for Yousef.” ’
A former primary school teacher, Jade then shrugged it off, insisting her mum would be around for many years to come. But finally she gave her word to do so.
Never did either of them imagine that, within days, Debbie would be taken by ambulance to Wythenshawe Hospital, near their home in Manchester, with what appears to have been an infection that rapidly developed into lethal sepsis.
Test results that came back shortly after she died ruled out the coronavirus, but there will be a postmortem examination to establish the exact cause of death.
To make matters worse, Jade had only seen her mother twice, from a safe distance, in two months. Debbie’s inflammatory rheumatoid arthritis meant she was especially vulnerable to Covid-19 and had received a letter from the NHS telling her to stay at home.
THIS was unbearably hard for Debbie, who saw Jade and her children every day prior to the pandemic. It was also tough for the children not being able to hug their adored Nan, who Jade says they considered a ‘second mum’.
Their only meetings came on Jade’s sons’ birthdays. Since the family always celebrated together, when little Daniel turned two on April 24, and Zack turned three on May 15, Jade and Mazen took all their boys to see Debbie.
‘We parked near her gate and stayed in the car so the kids wouldn’t be tempted to run to Mum, and she and my younger brother stood a distance away on the path,’ says Jade. ‘I took them each a slice of cake — I made the mistake of cutting a piece for Yousef too, we still forget he’s gone. Mum left the boys’ presents on the pavement for us to pick up.’
May 15 would be the last time they would see her alive.
Five day later, Debbie began feeling unwell with flu-like symptoms and aches, which she put down to her rheumatoid arthritis.
Her GP prescribed painkillers, but Debbie’s condition deteriorated and her 16- year- old son, also called Mazen, was left to take care of her.
As Jade recounts the days that followed, it is clear it hasn’t yet sunk in that her beloved mum, whom she frequently refers to in the present tense, has really gone.
‘every couple of hours I was calling or messaging to check how she was and kept asking her to go to hospital but she said: “No, I’m not going. I’m fine!”
‘She is . . . was . . . quite stubborn in that way, she will deal with pain and pretend she’s OK, when she’s not. By late Friday she couldn’t move and so we called the out-of-hours GP and he rang for an ambulance.
‘Mum sent me a text from the hospital on the Saturday saying: “It’s really painful to hold the phone, but I just want to let you know that I’m OK. They think it’s a flare-up of the arthritis.”
‘It was typical of her to try to reassure us. She was always worrying about us being worried.
‘When we lost Yousef, we had bad
anxiety so she’d do everything she could to ease it.
‘I replied to her message saying: “Hope you get better soon and if you need anything bringing up let us know.”
‘She never responded. I think that’s when she started really deteriorating — a couple of hours later, they put her in ICU.’
Hospital staff were staggered by the speed with which Debbie’s condition worsened, a fact Jade puts down to her having lost the strength, and will, to fight.
She had neither eaten nor slept properly since Yousef’s death on March 2 last year, following a stab wound to the heart while with friends in the affluent village of
Hale Barns, Greater Manchester — miles from his home in Burnage, a more working-class city suburb.
It was a case that shocked the nation and raised disturbing questions about privilege and class divisions.
Yousef had crossed that class boundary thanks to his intelligence, winning a place at the Manchester Grammar School, where he was preparing to take Oxbridge entrance exams. There he mixed with boys from very different backgrounds.
Joshua Molnar, now 18, referred to during the trial as Boy A as he was still a minor, was cleared of murder and manslaughter after a jury accepted he stabbed Yousef in self- defence. He was sentenced to a 16-month detention training order after admitting perverting the course of justice and possession of a knife.
Adam Chowdhary, 18, known as Boy B in court, had known Yousef for many years. He was sentenced to four months in a detention centre for possession of a knife, after admitting he’d bought two flick-knives over the internet.
When I interviewed Debbie last July, on the day the boys were sentenced, she recalled Chowdhary having been a regular visitor to their house in Burnage, where she would cover him with a blanket after he fell asleep on their sofa.
She spoke of how, despite his wealthy upbringing, he’d enjoyed the warm atmosphere and meals at the Makki family home.
Debbie was never able to fill in the gaps of her son’s final 24 hours. Instead, the family had to make do with the account given in court, where jurors were told Yousef died after a row with friends following their botched attempt to rob a drug dealer of £45 worth of cannabis.
Molnar was attacked in the failed robbery, leading to a later confrontation with Yousef and Chowdhary — though he at first told police a downright lie, claiming that two men in a silver car had stopped and killed their friend.
He told the jury he pulled out a flick-knife because Yousef had also produced a knife.
Yousef ’ s family have always maintained there was no DNA evidence that Yousef had a knife, but Molnar’s assertion, supported by Chowdhary, was accepted by the jury as part of Molnar’s selfdefence claim.
Molnar tearfully said he’d stabbed Yousef in part self-defence and part-accident: ‘I don’t really know what I did, kind of lifted my arm up. I didn’t realise anything had happened at first.’
As Yousef lay dying, Molnar and Chowdhary hid knives in bushes and down a drain, dialled 999 and tried to staunch the blood pouring out of his wound, to no avail.
LATER Molnar, who admitted carrying a knife at all times, controversially uploaded a video to his social media profile which showed him making stabbing gestures to a background of ‘drill music’, the genre of hip hop blamed by campaigners for fuelling gang wars and knife crime.
Debbie Makki’s sense of injustice in a 16-month sentence for the loss of her brilliant son’s life is what powered her on to raise the funds to bring a civil case against Molnar, in the course of which she hoped Yousef’s reputation as a hard-working, sporty boy would be restored.
To date, £25,000 of her £100,000 target has been achieved.
‘The thing that tormented Mum the most, and kept her awake at night, was that none of us who loved him were with Yousef when he died,’ says Jade. ‘ He was probably scared, looking into the faces of those boys.’
Yousef’s brother Mazen, and other sister, rachel, also have to try to cope with the double loss. rachel says: ‘The one comfort is that she is with Yousef again, and no longer in pain.’
Debbie had recently found some solace in Catholicism, the religion she was raised in — believing that she would meet her son again in heaven.
There will be a graveside service, for family and friends, followed by a burial on Tuesday, June 16.