Grieving father: The agony floods back with every stabbing
His tender young face featured on the Mail’s haunting front page. Today — one year after Sami Sidhom was knifed to death yards from his home — his broken father is STILL seeking justice for a son who was a tragic victim of mistaken identity
Switching on the television news at the weekend to hear the latest grim roll-call of stabbings, Samer Sidhom’s thoughts once again spiralled into the depths of darkness.
Unable to stop his mind racing back, he remembered the blue lights flickering through his living-room window, as he sat up late, waiting for his son to return home from watching an evening football match.
he recalled calling Sami’s phone and getting no reply; then dashing into the street to find his beloved boy lying, motionless, beneath a tree — just 25 paces from their front-door — as paramedics fought vainly to save him.
On April 16, a year will have passed since that awful night. A full year since 18-year-old Sami, who was studying law and history at a leading London university and dreamed of becoming a barrister, was stabbed to death by thugs who apparently mistook him to be in a rival gang.
Yet as Mr Sidhom, 53, told me this week: ‘whenever i hear someone has been stabbed, it brings it all flooding back, and hearing there were so many stabbings in one weekend has been especially hard. it is as though it has just happened.’
Reliving the tormenting images that play over and over in his mind’s-eye, he said: ‘Even when i went outside, i didn’t realise it was Sami lying there until they turned him over.
‘i wanted to talk to him but the police said it would be better if i stayed clear. So i just stood there for 40 minutes while they tried to save him. i suppose i was numb with shock.
‘i could see all the red marks where those cowards had stabbed him in the back.
‘But the hardest thing was seeing Sami’s eyes. they were open, but not blinking. i had never seen anything like that before and i can never forget it.’ Among the 285 people to have lost their lives to a savagely wielded blade in 2017/18 — 132 of them in London alone — Sami’s case struck a particularly poignant chord. For he represented the cream of Britain’s youth, and his future was rich with promise. here was a young man so academically gifted — and so photogenic, with his long, wavy hair and soft, brown eyes that, aged 12, he was singled out as a poster-boy for his generation.
his inquisitive face gazed down from billboards in newham, East London, as part of the local council’s campaign to encourage parents to register their children for school.
Sami had been attracted towards a law career by his desire to help others, his sense of justice, and his social conscience. he spent his spare time not carousing on the streets, but caring for his elderly grandmother.
in short, he was everything that the vicious thugs who set upon him were not. he is buried in the same grave as his grandfather, henry Sidhom, who brought his coptic christian family to Britain from Sudan, where they had been persecuted for their religion, a quarter of a century ago.
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family patriarch admired this country for its tolerance and democracy, and was convinced their lives would be safer here.
Sami’s father reflected on the tragic irony of this, a few days ago, as he laid a bouquet on the grave.
‘Sami was very close to his grandfather, who was a learned man and passed down his love of books and history, so it’s fitting that they are resting with one another,’ he told me tearfully. ‘it brings me some comfort to know that Sami is not alone.
‘But my father enjoyed a long, happy life. he had a family and a good job. (henry Sidhom was a senior airline executive). he lived until he was 88. Sami was only 18, and had his whole future ahead of him.’
Mr Sidhom paused to compose himself, then added: ‘it should never have been like this.’
though many other teenagers had been cut down on the streets, in many ways it was Sami’s murder that finally showed how utterly random and incomprehensible Britain’s knife murders had become.
that he was killed just yards from home, on an affluent street, in Forest gate, East London, and his father had emerged to see his life ebbing away, made it all the more shocking.
As in so many of these cases, his killers have not been caught.
Appealing for witnesses on BBc tV’s crimewatch, police said they believe the ‘ unprovoked, cowardly’ attack was carried out by three gang members who hunted Sami in a silver car, mistaking him to be from a gang with whom they had clashed minutes earlier.
Sami’s life could not have been further from those of the gang members. to his father, who built his life around Sami after taking sole custody of him as an infant when his mother became ill, he was simply ‘my best friend, and my whole world’.
when we returned from the cemetery, he took me into the living room, where a huge photo of Sami, and a west ham shirt signed by the team’s players, hang from the mantelpiece.
‘it’s important to keep the room like this,’ he explained.
‘it reminds me Sami is still there. i still try to carry on doing the things we did together, like watching the football on tV.’
he thumbed through a photo album he’s made, showing the happy times they enjoyed. there are pictures of Sami ice- skating, holidaying in Dubai, shopping for clothes and in a restaurant where he tasted his first (and last) glass of wine.
One sequence Mr Sidhom particularly likes, as it captures his son’s generosity of spirit, shows Sami teaching a small boy, whom he met in Richmond Park, to kick a football. ‘this little boy didn’t have a ball, so Sami invited him to share,’ he said.
As Mr Sidhom prepares for the first anniversary of the murder, which will be marked with a neighbourhood bike ride because Sami loved cycling, he spoke to the Mail for several reasons. clearly he wishes to honour his son’s memory. in doing so, he hopes to stir the authorities to take the measures he believes essential if the orgy of stabbings is ever to end. YEt
his over-riding purpose in keeping Sami’s case in the public eye is the belief that it might help to bring his killers to justice.
though police have arrested eight suspects, aged between 15 and 35, seven have been ‘released under investigation’, and an eighth freed with no further action.
that no one has been charged deepens Mr Sidhom’s despair.
On crimewatch, Detective chief inspector Mark wrigley, who is leading the inquiry, described Sami as ‘a popular boy’ who had ‘ never been involved in any criminality’, and said he had simply been ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.
while he accepts the police are doing their utmost to catch the killers — given their overstretched resources — Mr Sidhom takes issue with the jargonised explanation.
‘how can you be in the wrong place at the wrong time when you are just coming home?’ he asks plaintively.
Understandably, the police can give
the Sidhoms few details about the investigation. During the past 12 months, however, the family have scoured the internet for information about London gangs.
To their disgust, they have discovered the gangs award ‘points’ to members who stab a rival gang member. As they can find no reference to Sami, they suspect that even his killers accept they made a mistake, so no points were handed out for his murder.
Whatever the truth, they cling to the possibility that one of the gang might break ranks, if only to claim the £20,000 reward the Met is offering for crucial information.
Getting justice for his son is Mr Sidhom’s only reason for existence now, he said, for his life feels meaningless. ‘You try to be happy, but because he isn’t there, nothing brings you any joy. It’s so difficult to deal with life on a daily basis. I can’t return to my business (he ran a successful software company). Every day is a struggle from the moment you wake up in the morning.
‘My counsellors say it will take me time to accept Sami’s death, but how can I ever accept it while his killers are still out there?’
Having lost ‘the light of her life’, Sami’s widowed grandmother, Rafaa, 84, has also sunk into depression. Yet the ripples from this murder have spread beyond the family. They have changed the fabric of the neighbourhood where they live, creating an atmosphere of fear and trepidation.
‘Before Sami was murdered. I would look out of the window and see children playing in the street. I never see that now. People accompany their kids wherever they go,’ said Mr Sidhom.
‘When people stop and speak to me, the first thing they ask is why no one has been charged after all this time. Some have children of Sami’s age, and with this gang still free, they are worried it will happen to them next.’
Some good things have come of Sami’s death, though. For one thing, it has proved the strength of unity in this diverse community. That became evident from the earliest days, when more than 200 people of every colour and creed attended a church vigil for him.
Locals have shown support and kindness. Some have built a memorial outside the family’s house, keeping flowers fresh and polishing Sami’s framed photo. So what should be done to spare other parents this unending nightmare? Perhaps Mr Sidhom ought to have been invited to the Prime Minister’s knife-crime summit on Monday for he has a long list of sensible answers.
While he welcomes Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s decision, announced at the weekend, to extend police powers to stop and search in seven inner city areas where knife crime is most prevalent, he says this does not go nearly far enough.
‘These stabbings are not just happening in cities, they are everywhere now,’ he told me, citing the example of Yousef Makki, 17, a Manchester Grammar School pupil murdered in prosperous Hale Barns, Cheshire. People from ethnic minorities who complain of
being targeted unfairly during searches should stop complaining of victimisation and co- operate with police, he says.
‘I wouldn’t have been offended if Sami had been stopped because he had nothing to hide.
‘It’s a question of proportionality. Is it worth the little inconvenience of being stopped if it saves someone being stabbed? Yes it is.
‘I know there is a difficult history with stop and search, but that was a long time ago. The modern police force is well-trained to conduct these searches.
‘If you live in a neighbourhood with a high percentage of black kids, then obviously black kids are most likely to be searched.
‘If they had searched this gang before they stabbed Sami, he would still be here.’ MR
SIDHoM also wants people to be jailed, even when caught with an illegal blade for the first time. Drawing a parallel with New Zealand, whose prime minister swiftly introduced tough new gun control laws following the recent mosque massacre, he sees no reason why emergency laws to combat knife crime shouldn’t be passed here.
In the longer term, he advocates thousands more police officers; a return to foot patrols by cops who integrate with the community; the return of youth clubs; and more work on knife- crime, gangs and drug abuse in schools.
He has harsh words for middle- class drug-users whose partying fuels the marketplace where gangs operate: ‘I hold them responsible for Sami’s death, too,’ he says with contempt.
The gang members who stabbed Mr Sidhom’s only child in the back, without even troubling to check his identity, are surely without pity.
Yet were they ever to meet this desolate man, one wonders whether even they might feel some flicker of remorse.