Evening Standard - ES Magazine
An all too familiar scene
Young people dying at the end of a blade has become a tragic, omnipresent feature of life in the capital. As part of an ES Magazine special investigation, Emma Loffhagen meets the people on all sides of the knife crime front line
Walking to the first interview for this project, I noticed a young boy sitting on a wall a few roads down from my north London flat. He had his head in his hands and his body shook gently, quiet sobs erupting as his feet dangled above the ground. Opposite him lay a sea of flowers, some wilting, others fresh, weather-worn cards, their rain-defeated ink fading into illegibility and candles laid out to form the initials ‘JH’. When I came back home five hours later, he was still there.
It’s a memorial Londoners have walked past countless times since it appeared in early January, at the site where 24-year-old Jonah Ho-Shue was stabbed to death. He was the first person to be killed on London’s streets this year.
Around the capital, it is not uncommon to see shrines like this — tributes to lives cut tragically short. In many ways, knife crime is a hyper-visible problem in London. It is a fear which can sometimes lie dormant, and then be lit ablaze when a particularly senseless tragedy hits the headlines, such as the killing of 15-year-old schoolgirl Elianne Andam, or 16-year-old Harry Pitman at the end of last year.
Until 2016, youth violence in the capital was widely understood to be falling — down from a peak in 2009. Then the numbers started climbing again. The 2020 lockdown seemed to provide some respite, as rates of stabbings decreased for the first time in half a decade, but knife crime in London has risen each year since the pandemic, with a 22 per cent increase in Met Police recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the last year (up to September 2023).
It is undoubtedly a complex and fraught issue — even the stats can be hard to make sense of. Often, a sensationalised media and political reaction collapses all context. Moral panic about gangs, a loosely defined term, but one usually reserved for Black boys, abounds, and politicians promise harsher sentencing or crackdowns on forms of culture associated with the Black community, like drill music.
But away from opportunistic politicking and tabloid frenzy is a side of the story we tend to see less: the voices of the hundreds of people who silently bleed from every stab wound inflicted. Jessica Plummer, whose son was stabbed to death in 2015; Martin Griffiths, a trauma surgeon at the Royal London Hospital; Jacob*, who used to carry a knife himself; and Graeme Halleron, a Met Police officer working in violence prevention — all of their lives are a reminder of the infinite and devastating diameter of a knife.
“I got in the police car — it was the longest ride ever. And I prayed that my son was okay” Jessica Plummer
It was a bright and chilly Tuesday afternoon in January 2015, and 17-year-old Shaquan Sammy-Plummer was in good spirits. He had come home from college, Camden’s LaSwap, and was laughing with his mum, Jessica, as he quickly got dressed to head out to work at Tottenham football stadium. ‘He came to the mirror in the front room, he was fixing his clothes, and he said, “Mummy, look at your peng son”,’ Plummer remembers, smiling fondly. ‘Everyone always said he was good-looking. When Valentine’s Day came… I wish I could have shown you the cards and aftershave girls used to buy for him from the pound shop. But to me he was just normal, just Shaquan.’
As he stepped outside, Plummer repeated what she said to all of her three children whenever they left the house. ‘I said, “Remember to behave yourself. Be a leader, not a follower.”’ When he reached the end of the road, Shaquan turned around and waved goodbye to his mum.
‘And that was it,’ Plummer says. ‘I never saw my son again.’
Shaquan did not make it home that day. After work, he stopped by a house party in Winchmore Hill, but was turned away at the door by Jemal Williams, who told him it was full, but demanded that Shaquan hand over the drinks and snacks he had brought. Shaquan refused, but made no fuss and walked away.
He was only a few doors down when Williams grabbed a knife from the house, chased after Shaquan, and plunged it into his chest. The knife pierced his heart, and he stumbled and collapsed in a nearby driveway. He was pronounced dead at the Royal London Hospital a few hours later. According to reports, Williams had wanted to ‘teach Shaquan a lesson’. He was one of 15 teenagers stabbed to death on London’s streets in 2015.
When I meet Plummer in her Finsbury Park home, it has been nine years since Shaquan’s death. She greets me in a bonnet, fluffy pink slippers and a faded T-shirt with young Shaquan’s face on it. She is softly spoken but warm, smiling often, immediately adopting a motherly tenderness towards me. ‘Just like my Andre!’ she says when I tell her that I’m 24. ‘You could be my daughter.’
There is barely an inch of Plummer’s home that doesn’t bear some resemblance of Shaquan. The living room is a time capsule, her middle child’s face peering from every wall.
‘That one was taken on his first day at his job at Waitrose,’ Plummer tells me, swelling with pride when I point to a photo on the windowsill. ‘At [Shaquan’s] funeral, I met the Waitrose manager, and he said, “You raised that little boy so well, he was so well-behaved.” Everybody said he was a credit to me.’
‘He used to help old people on the street, take their stuff home for them. They would offer him money, [but] he wouldn’t take it.’
Shaquan’s was a life ripe with potential. An ambitious child, he got his first job at 11, leaving on his bike at five in the morning to do a paper round before school. He had offers to study at five universities, and was hoping to pursue a career in HR. Plummer even had a bottle of champagne ready for his 18th birthday.
On the night Shaquan died, Plummer was in her night dress, ironing her children’s school uniforms and chatting on the phone with a friend. Hearing a knock at the door, Plummer assumed it must be Shaquan coming back late from his shift. ‘But [they] carried on knocking and knocking.’
Plummer opened the door to find two police officers, who told her that Shaquan had been in an accident and was in hospital.
‘I fell on the stairs, I was so weak,’ she tells me, tears running down her face. ‘She [the police officer] helped me up. I wet myself, and she helped me change.
‘I got in the car with them — that was the longest ride ever. I had my fingers crossed the whole time like this.’ She holds out her crossed fingers to me. ‘And I prayed. I prayed that my son was okay.’
When she arrived at the Royal London, a man appeared in an orange suit. ‘He asked if I was Jessica Plummer, and asked me to sit down. I said I didn’t want to. He took a little while, and then he said to me that Shaquan had died. I said he was lying. He didn’t die. It was a lie.’
‘He asked me to come in with him to see my son, but I said no, because I was scared. And I regret it — I never got to see him or feel him. [That’s] going to be with me for the rest of my life. The only time I got to see my son was behind a screen.’
In the years since Shaquan’s death, Plummer has worked tirelessly to educate young people in London about the dangers of knife crime, speaking in schools on behalf of The Shaquan Sammy-Plummer Foundation, the charity she set up in her son’s name.
‘When I talk to children these days, they say, “There’s nowhere for us to go.” The youth centres have been shut down, so they find themselves outside. And that’s where the problems start.’
She still lives in fear for her two children, Shantel and Andre, her young granddaughter Shamiyah — and for herself.
‘I want to be there all the time to protect them,’ she tells me. ‘Because… I wasn’t there to protect Shaquan and I feel guilty. Sometimes I feel even guilty for laughing or dancing. So I avoid those things.
‘There are days I want to leave my house, but I can’t. Because [I’m scared] if I go out something will happen to me. I hate going on the train, because sometimes I think it’s easier for me to just run in front of the train and end my life.
‘That’s why I say Jemal is not serving a life sentence,’ she finishes. ‘I am. I’m still in prison.’