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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.
Mohammed’s identity had not been reported previously due to his age but this order was lifted by Mrs Justice Ellenbogen following 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 Mohammed, who attended court in a black hoodie, Ellenbogen rejected claims that he had acted in self-defence, saying that he had “blighted” the lives of anyone who knew Harvey, and had acted out of “the hurt and anger at what you considered to be his betrayal of your friendship”.
Harvey and Mohammed both 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, Mohammed 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 Mohammed had been part of conflicting friendship groups, and an argument had started between the two boys over a school lockdown brought about by Mohammed 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 Mohammed 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.
Photos and videos recovered from Mohammed’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 prior to the attack.
Mohammed 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”.
Since his murder, Harvey’s family 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 Mohammed “didn’t just end Harvey’s life, he ended ours too.”
