Olumide Wole-Madariola has to steel himself for his weekly telephone calls to his elderly mother in his native Nigeria – dreading the moment she asks after her grandson Malcolm.
Eight months after the teenager was murdered, Olumide remains so concerned by the devastating effect that news of her cherished grandson’s death may have on her health that he masks his grief behind cheerful descriptions of a happy family life. ‘She wouldn’t understand how something like this could happen,’ he told The Mail on Sunday. ‘We left Nigeria because we thought it was safer in England.’
That illusion was shattered on a November afternoon when A-level student Malcolm, 17, bravely tried to stop a fight between two youths and was stabbed to death.
Olumide Wole-Madariola, left, and his wife Olukemi, right, sat in court during the trial of those responsible for their son's death
Last month, instead of helping Malcolm prepare for university life as Olumide and his wife Olukemi had hoped, they were sat in an Old Bailey courtroom as Treynae Campbell, the man who put the murder weapon in the killer’s hand, was given 28 months in a young offenders jail.
The indifference of the two youths to their crime and its impact shocked them. ‘We went to the trial every day and the thing that really upset me was these boys showed no remorse, they were smirking,’ said Olumide, a security consultant.
‘At one point they said, “It was just a knife, no big deal.” But it was. I had four children and now I have three.’
No big deal sums up the ease with which Campbell was able to purchase 15 knives, including the blade that killed Malcolm, from a website called Knife Warehouse. ‘How does it not raise a red flag? Why does an inner-city kid from London need all those knives?’ asks Olumide.
Fighting back tears, Olukemi, 44, a special needs teacher, recalls hearing that her son had been attacked. ‘I got a call from his school principal who told me Malcolm had been wounded,’ she said. ‘My heart was beating so fast and I was shaking so much that I dropped the phone.
‘I just started walking and before I realised where I was, I found myself at our church. I started praying with the pastor for Malcolm and the police came to collect me and brought me to the hospital.
The weapon used to murder Malcolm had been purchased from an online retailer Knife Warehouse, who advertise their products with graphics such as this
‘Malcolm had never even been sick before. Three doctors came up to me and straight away I didn’t like the look on their faces. One told me to sit down and they said Malcolm had died.
‘It felt like I had come out of my body – I wanted to faint. My other children arrived and asked, “Where is Malcolm?” I told them he had died and they started crying. They wanted to see him, but I couldn’t go. They told me I
