Isichei’s tragic death must bring real change

THIS week the family of Allan Isichei, the muchloved and highly respected former Wasps first-team prop during the 1970s and 1980s, who was murdered near his home in Southall, west London, by a knife-wielding schizophrenic in August 2019, saw his assailant committed to psychiatric hospital indefinitely.

However, whether the grieving Isichei family – his wife Sandra, and children, Emma, David and Daniel – got justice is another matter.

His attacker, Gurjeet Lall, 36, stabbed the 69year-old Isichei multiple times with a kitchen knife after the managing director of his family business, Broadway Construction, confronted him about spitting on the pavement.

The assault on Isichei, who still coached rugby and played in a jazz band, and was described in court as his family’s ‘inspiration’, left him mortally injured and he died an hour and a half later from his wounds.

It emerged in court that Lall, who had previous convictions for knife crime – including being jailed for four months in 2018 for carrying a knife at a bus station ‘to ward people off ’– and also had a history of domestic abuse against his mother, had stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication almost a year before the incident.

Inexplicably, Lall was returned to the community unsupervised after being arrested again for carrying a knife in January 2019.

In a joint statement, Emma, Daniel, and David Isichei urged the relevant authorities, “to answer the questions” surrounding the release and lack of supervision for an unmedicated, knife-carrying schizophrenic.

Everyone who knew Allan Isichei, especially those within the Wasps community, endorse his family’s request that, “something must be done, we want to see something positive come out of this”.

That way Allan Isichei’s family will have the comfort of knowing they have made a difference to a long-standing social problem.