The teenager convicted of the murder of Harvey Willgoose has been named and sentenced to life with a minimum of 16 years in prison.
Mohammed Umar Khan, also 15, was handed the sentence by the judge, Naomi Ellenbogen, on Wednesday after being found guilty in August of stabbing Harvey in a Sheffield secondary school.
Khan’s identity had not been reported previously because of his age but Mrs Justice Ellenbogen lifted the order after applications from a number of media organisations. She said his age alone did not justify maintaining his anonymity and that the “public will wish to know the identity of those who commit such serious offences”.
Addressing Khan, who attended court in a black hoodie, the judge rejected claims that he had acted in self-defence, saying that he had blighted the lives of anyone who had known Harvey, and had acted out of “the hurt and anger at what you considered to be his betrayal of your friendship”. Khan did not show any emotion or remorse as the sentence was read out.
Harvey and Khan attended All Saints Catholic high school in Sheffield, where the attack took place on 3 February during a lunchbreak. The court heard that students who witnessed the attack ran away “in fear and panic”, with some locking themselves in a cupboard.
The court also heard that immediately after stabbing Harvey, Khan had told the school’s headteacher: “I’m not right in the head. My mum doesn’t look after me right” and “you know I can’t control it”.
During the trial, the court heard that Harvey and Khan had been part of conflicting friendship groups, and an argument had started between the two boys over a school lockdown brought about by Khan reporting that another student had a knife, and a social media dispute that followed it.
The jury saw CCTV footage from inside the school which showed Khan pushing Harvey in the school’s corridors. Another clip showed him producing a 13cm (5in) hunting knife. He later stabbed Harvey twice in the chest in the school courtyard. One of the blows penetrated his ribs and hit him in the heart.
During the sentencing the judge stated that Harvey may have said things to Khan that upset or angered him, but told him that he was still the aggressor and that anything his victim may have said was “not at a level which indicated to you that Harvey posed any real threat at that time, or provides any mitigation for what followed”.
Photos and videos recovered from Khan’s phone that showed him posing with knives and other weapons were also shown to the jury, and the court was told he had searched terms related to weaponry on the internet before the attack.
Khan told the court that he carried a knife for protection and feared some of his fellow students, while Gul Nawaz Hussain KC told the court that the boy had been bullied for years at the school and “snapped” following a “an intense period of fear at school”, but that the crime was still inexcusable.
“Whilst he has suffered humiliation and ostracisation in the past, it is nothing compared to the pain and loss that the parents of Harvey and his family have experienced,” he said. “That is not lost on Umar.”
Hussain also said Khan would learn from his time in prison because he, “unlike Harvey, will still have a chance of leading a life and that blessing is not lost upon him”.
Since Harvey’s murder, his family, who attended the sentencing and much of the trial, have campaigned against knife crime and set up a youth club in their son’s memory. Before the sentencing, his sister, Sophie, describing Harvey as “warm, funny and caring”, told the court that “the pain will remain with us for the rest of our lives” and that Khan “didn’t just end Harvey’s life, he ended ours too”.
All Saints Catholic high school said in a statement after the sentencing that the school and the trust had “been able to engage fully with a number of ongoing investigations aimed at answering key questions about Harvey’s tragic death”.
