West Midlands Police reveal what they think is driving knife crime – amid family’s shock at age of killers
“Brave” and “funny” with a “weird sense of humour” is how Shana Seesahai describes her older brother Shawn.
Growing up on the small Caribbean Island of Anguilla, the two siblings developed an extremely close bond. Shawn was very protective of his little sister, five years his junior.
“Almost every day I wake up and think about him. My mind just goes on him immediately,” says Shana, 15.
“In my mind I don’t feel like he’s passed away, I know he has, but it doesn’t feel like that.”
Shawn was beaten and stabbed to death with a machete by two 12-year-old boys on 13 November 2023 in Wolverhampton. He was 19 years old.
He’d travelled to the UK for cataract surgery and was planning on building a life in the West Midlands. He was murdered the day before he was due to start a course in engineering in Birmingham.
Shawn had phoned his younger sister earlier that day.
Shana Seesahai
She remembers: “He called me in school in break time, and he asked me how I was and stuff like that. A few minutes later we finished talking and he told me that he loves me and we’ll talk later. But then it didn’t come.
“That was the last day that he told me that he loved me.”
Shana cannot understand why Shawn was murdered.
“It’s shocking. Wow, 12 years old?! It doesn’t make sense, it’s just crazy.”
Family scattered Shawn Seesahai’s ashes on his favourite beach
Shawn’s murderers, both now 13, can’t be named for legal reasons.
They will be sentenced on 27 September at Nottingham Crown Court. They are the youngest ever knife killers in the UK.
Adam, (not his real name), knows them both.
“It was just shocking,” he says.
“I thought [one of the boys] was going to grow up to be a basketballer or something. I didn’t expect him to do something like that.”
He describes the other boy who killed Shawn as a “bad breed”.
Adam is 14. He says it’s common for children to carry knives in this area and admits he sometimes goes out with knives after being threatened with blades multiple times.
“I can’t let that happen again. It’s real life. It’s nothing fake. It’s not nothing to joke about because you can get killed.”
The CCTV footage of the attack on Shawn is too grainy to know what truly happened.
CCTV footage examined by police investigating the murder
Shawn and his killers were strangers and Shawn’s murder seems to have been completely unprovoked.
He was unarmed, while they had a machete. The boy who owned the weapon had posed with it earlier that day for a photo that was uploaded to Snapchat.
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The West Midlands has the highest rate of knife crime in the country.
Inspector Colin Gallier leads West Midlands Police’s youth violence and knife crime team. He says social media has become a “massively powerful tool” in fuelling knife crime in the region.
“Certainly, we do see young people and groups and gangs promoting themselves, almost mimicking other target rival gangs and that itself incites violence, an opportunity for them to raise their profile and potentially intimidate others as well,” he says.
But there is no suggestion Shawn was involved with gangs. He was simply, and tragically, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So why is knife violence so high in the West Midlands?
A machete hidden under a bed, which was found by officers investigating the killing
“It’s poverty-driven,” says Malachi Nunes, who mentors young people in the region in an effort to reduce knife crime. He has worked with children as young as nine years old.
“When you see the area they’re from… low income. That’s kind of the driver behind a lot of these things,” he adds.
“Some of the youths carry knives because they want to go rob someone else for something they don’t have, and because there are some other youths that are doing the same thing. When they both meet up it’s a case of who’s backing down first.”
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Inspector Gallier says when he asks young people why they carry knives, he often hears that it’s for protection.
On patrol with the inspector and his team in Birmingham city centre, we see this play out when a member of the public reports seeing someone armed with a blade.
After chasing him down, officers search him and find a large kitchen knife hidden in the leg of his tracksuit bottoms.
“We’ve done some immediate police checks and from our records, it seems that this individual has been the victim of street robberies in the past,” says Inspector Gallier.
The boy they’ve arrested is just 15 years old.
Many leading politicians are fond of talking about having been on a journey. But Kemi Badenoch’s journey has been longer and more eventful than most.
From the leafy London suburb of Wimbledon to Nigeria in West Africa and back to south London, and from the socialist hotbed of Sussex University to the rural idyll of Saffron Walden in Essex, she will hope her journey will ultimately take her to 10 Downing Street.
Along the way, this battling Boudica of the Conservative Party has earned a reputation for a combative and at times abrasive style of politics, aggressive even: someone who’d cross the road to have a fight.
Politics live: Reaction after new leader of opposition elected
“I am somebody who is very blunt,” she admitted when challenged about this reputation by Sophy Ridge on Sky News this week.
“I’m very forthright and I’m very confident as well. I’m not a wallflower.”
Now the Conservative Party members have voted to elect her as leader after strong performances in hustings and a TV debate which saw her recover from a gaffe-prone party conference.
In the three stages of the leadership contest, she gained momentum at the right time. Robert Jenrick was the candidate with momentum in the early rounds of voting by MPs in September.
James Cleverly then had it after he stole the show at the conference “beauty contest”. But as party members cast their votes, the momentum appeared to be with Ms Badenoch.
It did not look that way at the conference in Birmingham, when she clumsily declared maternity pay was “excessive” and said some civil servants were so bad 10% of them should be in prison.
Ironically, given her maternity pay gaffe, the mother-of-three has benefited from a row over veteran Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope, a Jenrick backer, declaring: “You can’t spend all your time with your family at the same time being leader of the opposition.”
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Badenoch elected Conservative leader
Wimbledon to Nigeria – and back again
Ms Badenoch’s background, however, is literally miles away – more than 3,000, in fact – from those of typical Conservative politicians. Her early years were spent in Nigeria, controversially described by David Cameron in 2016 as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Her Nigerian parents were comfortably middle class, “with a car and a driver”, she says. Father Femi was a GP with his own clinic, and her mother Feyi was an academic at the University of Lagos college of medicine.
But Ms Badenoch – full name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke – was born in the private St Teresa’s Hospital in Wimbledon in January 1980 after her parents travelled to Britain and paid for private healthcare. It meant she had a British passport.
She then lived in Lagos until she was 16, when she returned to Wimbledon to take her A levels, in maths, biology and chemistry, living with her mother’s best friend “for a better future”, after arriving in the UK with just £100.
So she worked part-time in Wimbledon’s McDonald’s, cleaning toilets and “flipping burgers”, she says. Yet last month she was ridiculed by Labour MPs after saying: “I became working class when I was 16 working at McDonald’s.”
Next on her journey was Sussex University and a computer course. Here she had no time for the left-wing students she called “stupid lefty white kids” and later denounced Bob Geldof’s 2005 Live 8 charity concerts as patronising to Africans.
Working in banking, she joined the Conservative Party in that year, and though she was a massive Margaret Thatcher fan she became an early Cameroon.
She was on her way, becoming a member of the London Assembly and fighting Dulwich and West Norwood against Labour’s Tessa Jowell in the 2010 general election, coming third behind the Liberal Democrats.
Kemi Badenoch has spoken of her admiration for Mrs Thatcher. Pic: PA
Just like Mrs Thatcher nearly 60 years earlier, it was when she was a parliamentary candidate that Kemi met her husband, Cambridge-educated banker and party activist Hamish Badenoch.
He had been head boy at Ampleforth College, the catholic public school, a councillor in Merton, south London, and Conservative candidate in Foyle, in Northern Ireland, in the 2015 general election.
They were both born at the same hospital in Wimbledon, St Teresa’s, a year apart. After university Hamish worked in Malawi, Nigeria and Kenya before returning to London and Barclays, before his current job at Deutsche Bank.
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Entry into politics
But the noughties saw two potentially embarrassing blemishes on Ms Badenoch’s upwardly mobile CV. One was her widely reported hacking of Harriet Harman’s website, revealed shortly after she became MP for Saffron Walden in 2017.
These days, she regards the incident as relatively trivial. “It was a summary offence at the time, the same as a speeding ticket,” she told Sophy Ridge this week. “It was actually something quite different from what the law is now.
“And this was something that happened ten years before I was a member of parliament. It was very amusing at the time. Now that I’m an MP, it’s a lot less amusing.”
The other, described in Lord Ashcroft’s biography, Blue Ambition, was a near-fight with a member of the public at Oxford Town Hall in 2006 during a Conservative party event.
After an argument between the pair, the woman slapped Ms Badenoch and then ran off. Ms Badenoch then chased her up some stairs and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back, before letting go and the woman ran out of the town hall.
“I never saw her again, thank goodness,” she said, recalling the incident years later.
Once in parliament with a safe seat, now called North West Essex, Brexiteer Badenoch’s ascent up the ministerial ladder was swift: party vice-chair, children and families, international trade, Treasury, equalities and local government, before joining Liz Truss’s cabinet and continuing under Rishi Sunak.
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‘I will swing back’
In the 2019 Tory leadership contest, she backed Michael Gove, widely viewed by MPs as her long-term mentor. Then in 2022, after quitting along with umpteen other ministers triggering Boris Johnson’s downfall, she stood herself, coming fourth. But she had put down a marker.
As a cabinet minister, covering business and equalities at the same time, she has lived up to her reputation as a blunt-speaking – critics would say rude – political scrapper, with some fiery clashes with opponents, some Tories and even Dr Who.
Her handling of the Post Office Horizon scandal was fiercely criticised after she controversially sacked Post Office chairman Henry Staunton when he claimed he was told to “stall” compensation payments – and then had a public row with him.
Courting controversy
One of her most high-profile spats was with former Doctor Who star David Tennant, after he said at the British LGBT awards: “Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more – I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”
She hit back on X: “I will not shut up. A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.”
She has also been reprimanded by Caroline Nokes, then chair of the equalities committee and now – ominously for Ms Badenoch – a Commons deputy speaker.
Pic: Reuters
During a bad-tempered and shouty row at a hearing of Ms Nokes’ committee, Ms Badenoch accused the left-wing Labour MP Kate Osborne of lying in a row about trans issues.
Last year she infuriated Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle by issuing a written statement on scrapping EU laws after Brexit rather than making a full Commons statement to MPs.
After she told the speaker she was sorry the timing of the announcement was “not to your satisfaction”, Sir Lindsay bellowed at her: “Who do you think you’re speaking to?”
It’s clashes like these on her long political journey that have led to claims that Ms Badenoch could start a fight in an empty room.
She is, after all, an aggressive, confrontational anti-woke crusader who takes no prisoners. And that’s just what her supporters say!
Sir Keir Starmer, beware.
UK
Four girls suffer ‘potentially life-changing injuries’ in bathroom of Brighton fast-food restaurant
Four girls have suffered serious burns in the bathroom of a Brighton fast-food restaurant.
Emergency services were called at 8.28pm on Thursday, which was also Halloween, to reports of a fire at a Wendy’s restaurant on Western Road, Brighton.
The four 12-year-old girls suffered “potentially life-changing” injuries, according to Sussex police, and were taken to hospital.
They remain in serious but stable conditions.
Sussex Police and the fire service are still looking into the cause of the incident, but said no fireworks were involved.
The incident was accidental, according to the fire and rescue service, and members of the public were not at risk.
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Three fire engines, an aerial appliance and specialist officers attended.
The police force said they would not release more information at this time as they are “being sensitive towards the injuries of the people involved”.
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“Our thoughts are with those recovering from this incident in our Brighton restaurant,” a spokesperson for Wendy’s said.
“The safety of our customers and employees is our highest priority. We are continuing to work with the local police authorities on their investigation.”
Kemi Badenoch has won the race to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
The 44-year-old North West Essex MP has been declared the winner of the months-long contest, beating Robert Jenrick.
Ms Badenoch received 53,806 votes to Mr Jenrick’s 41,388.
Politics latest: Reaction after new leader of the opposition revealed
Ms Badenoch has served as shadow business and trade secretary since the Conservative Party lost the general election in July and Rishi Sunak said he would stand down as leader, triggering the campaign.
Her campaign was called Renewal 2030 and has targeted the next election for the Tories to return to power.
Ms Badenoch has been criticised at times for her outspoken approach, with opponents jumping on comments she has made about subjects such as maternity pay, gender equality and net zero.
But she has long been popular among the party membership, and previously ran to be leader in 2022.
It is not clear who her shadow cabinet will be made up of, but she has suggested that all those who ran to be leader against her should be involved.
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Badenoch crowned Tory leader
However, James Cleverly revealed the day before the results that he would be returning to the backbenches.
Speaking after her win, Ms Badenoch thanked the other candidates, saying the party had come through the campaign “more united”.
The new leader went on to say the party’s first duty as opposition was to hold Labour to account – and also to prepare for government by the time of the next election.
She then went on to criticise previous Conservative administrations.
Ms Badenoch said: “Our party is critical to the success of our country.
“But to be heard, we have to be honest, honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip.
“The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party and our country the new start that they deserve.
“It is time to get down to business. It is time to renew.”
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Badenoch: ‘We let standards slip’
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
In total, around 132,000 members of the Conservative Party were eligible to vote in the leadership election – a noticeable fall from the 172,000 in the contest in 2022 which Liz Truss won.
The turnout was also down – 72.8% in 2024 vs 82.2% in 2022 – with around 40,000 members not voting.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “Congratulations, Kemi Badenoch, on becoming the Conservative Party’s new leader.
“The first black leader of a Westminster party is a proud moment for our country.
“I look forward to working with you and your party in the interests of the British people.”
Ellie Reeves, who is chair of the Labour Party, delivered a more political attack: “It’s been a summer of yet more Conservative chaos and division.
“They could have spent the past four months listening to the public, taking responsibility for the mess they made and changing their party.
“Instead, Kemi Badenoch’s election as leader shows they’re incapable of change.
“Meanwhile, the Labour Government is getting on with fixing the foundations of our economy and cleaning up the mess the Tories left behind.”
Mr Jenrick congratulate Ms Badenoch on her win. Pic: PA
Read more on UK politics:
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Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey congratulated Ms Badenoch as well for her election – before adding that the Tories are still “too divided, out-of-touch and unable to accept Conservative failures over the past years”.
Richard Tice, the leader of the Conservative Party, did not congratulate her and instead attacked Ms Badenoch for her record – saying “she has failed the British public before and she will fail them again as leader of the Conservative Party”.
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