Mother of race-hate murder victim on her decade of pain
A decade after her son was tortured to death by Asian thugs, Kriss Donald’s mother warns:
IT was a scene of domestic turmoil familiar to most parents on a busy weekday morning. Angela Donald’s teenage son Kriss hadn’t gone to school as he felt unwell, and his dog Jack was happily rampaging around the house – covered in green paint. Meanwhile, Kriss’s four-year- old twin sisters, who were responsible for the paint job, had to be bathed, as well as the dog.
‘Kriss had a sore throat,’ Angela recalls. ‘He asked could he not go to school. I agreed, I was a bit frazzled looking after my daughters. Kriss stayed off on the understanding that he cleaned the dog.
‘I bathed the girls, and the dog, and Kriss helped me with the girls.’
Despite the havoc it caused that morning exactly a decade ago, Angela is glad she had agreed to Kriss’s repeated requests for a family pet, because soon afterwards her son was snatched from her life for ever.
Aged only 15, he was abducted by Asian thugs after he briefly left the family home in Pollokshields, Glasgow, later that day to visit a friend.
Kriss was tortured and set alight in an orgy of violence led by serial thug Imran Shahid, nicknamed Baldy.
Shahid plucked the schoolboy from the streets simply because he was white, and subjected him to unimaginable suffering.
It was Scotland’s first race-hate killing, and it sparked simmering racial tensions in the ethnically diverse neighbourhood where Kriss had lived.
But with typical courage, his mother has consistently defied attempts by political groups to turn his murder into a rallying point for extremists.
Today marks the tenth anniversary of Kriss’s death and this week Angela, 50, spoke to the Scottish Daily Mail about her family’s nightmarish ordeal.
Her ‘ beautiful boy’, who had hoped to be a mechanic or join the Army, died just a few months before his 16th birthday.
‘The saddest thing was when his National Insurance certificate came through the door, for “Mr Kriss Donald”, and he didn’t get it,’ Angela says.
‘He was murdered in March 2004 and it would have been his birthday in July. He never got to his sweet 16 – or his 21st.
‘We celebrate his birthday still. We get a cake and we have a food fight. I know that Kriss sees it; it’s sad for me that he has seen us going through such heartache and pain.’
Angela’s memory of the day he was abducted – March 15, 2004 – is still electrically vivid, and even though she did not witness his savage murder, she has visualised every moment.
That horrific vision has been replayed in her mind for much of the last decade, meaning she was reduced to being a ‘ robotic’ mother as she cared for her twins Tayler and Amber, now 14, Kriss’s brother Laurie, 20, and his sister Samantha, 27.
A woman of immense dignity and courage, Angela admits her continuing anger at the awful senselessness of Kriss’s murder has helped her to survive.
THEY broke my heart,’ she says at her semidetached home in Glasgow, surrounded by the paraphernalia of family life.
‘Sometimes I’ve got nothing but contempt for his killers. I’ve got anger – I just think why? None of these guys knew Kriss. He was a boy. He was 15.
‘He was surrounded by men. I had to face every single second of them with their hands on him. Thank God I had the strength to go there.
‘It took me eight years, from 2004 to 2012, to absolutely exhaust everything they had done and to try to be free of pain.
‘I had to visualise it. I had to go there. That was something that came from me. That was something I had to go through. You have to face the evil.’
On the day Kriss was abducted, Angela felt certain from the start he would not be coming back. ‘His friend came round wanting him to go out but I wouldn’t let him. I told him if you don’t go to school, you can’t go out,’ she remembers.
‘But I let him go round to his friend Jamie’s to get his video games on the understanding that he had to come back because he’d been off school. But he never came back.’
A neighbour told Angela, as she stood in the hallway of her home, about Kriss’s abduction.
‘I knew what was happening was severe,’ she says. ‘Something changed me. I felt my boy inside me. I felt he was inside me. But I was absolutely distraught.’
Shahid and his helpers grabbed Kriss in Kenmure Street, Pollokshields, and bundled him into a car. As he was snatched, Kriss cried out: ‘I’m only 15, what did I do?’
After driving around for several hours, they dragged him from the stolen Mercedes, stabbed him 13 times, doused him in petrol and set him on fire while he was still alive.
Kriss’s charred, half-naked body was found the following day on the Clyde Walkway, behind Celtic’s training ground in the East End of Glasgow.
As it later emerged, Shahid targeted Kriss ‘because he was the first white boy he came across’.
The previous evening, the bodybuilding fanatic had been left humiliated by white youths who taunted him then ran off – and he had been determined to vent his rage.
He had been jailed previously for a frenzied baseball bat attack that left his defenceless victim permanently brain-damaged.
Freed early from prison, he continued his descent into Glasgow gang culture with his brother Zeeshan.
Kriss was not part of any of this. He went to a multi- cultural school and most of his friends were Asian. He came from a Christian family that was tolerant of all religions.
‘It was nothing to do with Kriss,’ says Angela. ‘As the judge said, Kriss was wholly innocent, as was my family.’
Within a week of the murder, Shahid and his accomplices were the prime suspects but had already fled to Pakistan.
Angela was praised for her calm refusal to fan the flames of rising racial tensions in Pollokshields, where there were growing fears of race riots.
But she admits that, at the time, she wasn’t fully aware of the shockwaves triggered by Kriss’s murder.
‘I wasn’t conscious of it all,’ she says. ‘They didn’t bring his body home for three months, so my blinds were down. I had to take my wee girls to nursery. I had to function day to day, I did it robotically. That was the very start of my personal hell that they chose to me put through.’
The tightly- knit Pakistani community was also horrified at Kriss’s murder and increasingly fearful of a racist backlash. Some were willing to provide family contacts for the fugitives in Pakistan.
MOHAMMAD Sarwar, then Glasgow Central MP and now governor of Punjab, arranged high-level diplomatic meetings with Pakistani political contacts.
‘Tony Blair’s government shut the doors on us,’ Angela says. ‘ The breakthroughs c a me because of the police, the determination of [Detective Superintendent] Elliot McKenzie [who led the hunt] and Mr Sarwar, the work he did in Pakistan was phenomenal. I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart.’
Police first mounted a dawn raid on Imran Shahid’s flat in Lahore, where he unsuccessfully tried to bribe them.
Shahid’s accomplices, Zeeshan Shahid and Mohammed Mushtaq, were also captured and the trio were extradited back to Scotland for trial.
Angela had been confident they would be brought back and was overjoyed when they were found but had mixed feelings about their return.
‘Had there not been so much corruption in Pakistani jails, I would’ve loved them to stay there,’ she says.
‘Mr Sarwar informed us of the state of the jails – they were in chains. But they’re Glaswegians. It’s only right they probably should spend their sentences in Scottish jails.’
Sentencing the killers in 2006, Lord Uist described the murder as ‘savage and barbaric’.
Shahid, 37, was ordered to spend at least 25 years behind bars. Zeeshan Shahid, 35, was jailed for a minimum of 23 years while Mohammed Mushtaq, 37, was handed a 22-year sentence.
Another man, Daanish Zahid, 30, i s already serving a life sentence after being convicted at an earlier trial of helping to abduct and murder Kriss.
The trial of Shahid and his fellow killers, Angela says, was ‘ absolutely horrendous’. She attended with Samantha, calmly listening to day after day of graphic evidence.
‘Shahid looked at me and smiled such a horrible smile,’ Angela remembers. ‘ Mushtaq was horrendous. He swaggered in and faced me and my daughter every day, put his arm round the seat; he was very nonchalant. They put me in hell, those men who laughed and swaggered and had contempt for me and my daughter.’
In jail, as well as launching
costly, failed appeals, Shahid has continued to inflict pain on the Donald family. He used a smuggled mobile phone last year to call a newspaper from his prison cell and send pictures of him flexing his naked torso.
This boastful behaviour has marked Shahid out as a target in jail. Last year, he almost died after a brutal attack by fellow inmates in the gym at Kilmarnock Prison, Ayrshire. He was working out on a rowi ng machine when a prisoner smashed a 33lb (15kg) weight over his head and stamped on his body after he collapsed. Other prisoners joined in the assault.
Doctors said Shahid, who needed surgery and wore a neck collar for 12 weeks, only survived because of his ‘extreme muscular build’.
Meanwhile, some have sought to politicise the murder.
Today, Angela intends to visit the memorial bench on the Clyde Walkway near the spot where Kriss’s remains were found, but not until early evening – around the time her son died a decade ago – to avoid the ‘white supremacists’, including members of the British National Party (BNP), who gather there on the anniversary of Kriss’s death each year.
EARLIER this month, it emerged the leader of the anti-Islam Scottish Defence League (SDL) had tattooed a tribute to Kriss on his arm. The SDL was forced to cancel a series of events to mark the anniversary this year, including floral tributes in Glasgow Green, after ‘heated’ discussions with police.
Angela has always been determined to avoid becoming involved.
‘Kriss died surrounded by hate, by those men who slaughtered my baby,’ Angela says. ‘So why would I want to be part of anything that promotes hate?
‘Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, wanted to meet me after Kriss’s murder but I refused. I don’t hate any other race or colour, I really don’t. My boy went through enough hate; enough hate was put on my family. I’ve said absolutely nothing. Let them get on with it.’
Samantha will go to Kriss’s grave today, but Angela prefers to visit the walkway.
‘For me, that was where he left the earth,’ she says. ‘But I feel close to him all the time. We will have a candle and tulips on Saturday because Kriss wanted to go to Amsterdam when he was 16.’
The effect of the murder on Angel a’s other children has been profound.
‘Tayler and Amber have been in this with me since day one,’ Angela says. ‘They saw their mum as no wee girl should ever see their mum. In the last couple of years, I’ve had to come back into the world.
‘ I find myself doing a lot for them… They did a lot for me.’
Tayler and Amber, her ‘special lassies’, knew from the age of four that Kriss had died, though they were unaware of the horrific details.
She recalls: ‘We had to tell them over the years. They found out t hrough another wee c hi l d and forced me to give them the absolute truth. Tayler was upset with me and Samantha because they felt as though we lied to her. She was angry and upset. She was upset with her big sister. They’re very mature wee girls given what they’ve been through.’
ANGELA separated from Samantha and Kriss’s father Alexander McDermott, a painter and decorator, when Kriss was very small, although the schoolboy did visit his father regularly in Portsmouth, Hampshire.
Tragically, Kriss’s stepfather Billy, who raised him as his own, died from cancer aged 52 in 2005.
Samantha now has a five-year-old daughter, Reagan, while ‘calm and strong’ Laurie is a Royal Marine whose passing-out parade will be held in Exeter later this month, a source of huge pride for Angela and her family.
‘Laurie’s very private. He internalised a lot of it,’ she says. ‘He was ten-and-a-half when his brother was murdered. I had to be very gentle with him. He had found a newspaper one day and got his version of it then.’
Though she loves Glasgow, Angela, the daughter of a shipyard worker in the city, often dreams of leaving to escape painful memories.
But the city also provides a powerful connection to Kriss. In 2005, she says, she walked around Pollokshields, retracing Kriss’s steps, a process which she said was a form of ‘healing’.
Life, against all the odds, has gone on. ‘I would never lie down and die for those animals,’ Angela says.
She has been studying computing at college and has, at last, a sense of hope for the future, for her and her family.
‘I remember standing at the kitchen window and smiling, a couple of years ago,’ she says. ‘I had a sense of feeling good.’
But there are still some questions that will never be answered. ‘I ask myself, “Why my boy, why my innocent boy?”
‘But it was my boy. I can’t change that.’