At random. This is how he selected his victim, a boy of just 12 years old, a 15-year-old British teenager who was sentenced this Tuesday in a court in Birmingham (England) to a minimum of thirteen years in prison after stabbing him to death in January 2025.
The teenager, who cannot be identified because he is a minor, was 14 years old when he attacked the little boy who was returning home for no apparent reason, as he was crossing a park.
The boy was stabbed in the stomach several times to death.
The minor was rushed to hospital and died hours later, despite the attempts of emergency services to save his life.
That same day, theteenager also attacked another unknown 82-year-old woman in the park whom he tried to drown.
Furthermore, it has been proven that the day before, and in that same park, attacked three elderly women, causing injuries “which is difficult to imagine,” said the judge.
According to the magistrate,It was clear that there was a pattern of behavior for the aggressor: “You were prowling around the park looking for a victim,” he said, addressing him, adding that these attacks gave him “the pleasure of observing the consequences.”
According to the media present in the room, the teenager listened to the sentence without flinchingwhile the foster family of the murdered child could not hold back their tears.
The case has shocked the United Kingdom and, in particular, the community of Birmingham, where the minor is considered one of the youngest victims of the wave of knife violence in the West Midlands region.
The succession of attacks, the random choice of the victim and the coldness shown by the teenager during the investigations have revived the debate about the increase in knife crimes committed by minors and about how to detect and prevent them in time
Meanwhile, the victim’s family has stressed that Leo’s life “should be just beginning” and that no sentence will be able to repair the loss of their son.