Mother of Nottingham attacks victim Barnaby Webber ‘misses his beaming smile’

The mother of a student who was stabbed to death in Nottingham has told Sky News she misses his “beaming smile” and said his family was “still coming to terms” with their loss.

Emma Webber was speaking at a memorial cricket match for her son Barnaby and friend Grace O’Malley-Kumar.

The students, who both loved cricket, had been celebrating the end of their exams when they were stabbed to death as they walked home from a night out in June.

School caretaker Ian Coates was also killed on his way to work.

Valdo Calocane, 31, of no fixed address, is charged with their murders and the attempted murders of three others.

‘I miss everything’

Mrs Webber said it was comforting to be among her son’s friends for the memorial matches at the University of Nottingham, where both teenagers studied.

“I miss his beaming smile, I miss his banter with his brother, I miss his eye roll emojis… I miss everything, the pain of walking past his bedroom, seeing his clothes, his cricket bag, are all there but he’s not,” she said.

“We’re still coming to terms with that. Whether one day maybe we will, maybe we won’t, I don’t think there’s a rule book for this but we miss him, we miss his energy.

“But we will, where we can, move forward and try to find those glimmers of light.”

GoFundMe pages to raise money for memorial foundations

The families of Barnaby and Grace have set up GoFundMe pages and they intend to use the money raised to launch foundations in their memory.

Grace’s 16-year-old brother, James, played in the cricket fundraiser and told Sky News that his family’s pain is “still very raw”, but he hopes that “something good” will come out of the “horrible tragedy”.

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“Although we’ve been heartbroken we have to ensure that we can make something good from this,” he said.

“We’ll use the foundation as a platform to better the causes that Grace supported and meant a lot to her – the things that meant a lot to her mean a lot to me and my mum and dad.

“It’s still very raw, the whole thing, obviously it’s just day by day, step by step at the moment.”