A blood-soaked top. Blood-spattered trainers. These are the shocking keepsakes that the family of stabbing victim Yousef Makki want all parents to see, to encourage a conversation with their kids and prevent another family suffering the devastation caused by knife crime.
Yousef became an unwanted emblem of how knife crime has blighted all parts of society when he was fatally stabbed through the heart aged 17. From a humble background, the talented Manchester Grammar School pupil from Burnage had been killed by his rich friend, Joshua Molnar, on leafy Gorse Bank Road in affluent Hale Barns on March 2, 2019.
Now his campaigning older sister, Jade Akoum, has written a book, The Boy With A Pound In His Pocket, which outlines with shocking openness and detail how a single stab wound not only ended Yousef's promising life but also ripped apart many others.
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In her book, Jade, a mother-of-four, has published images of the blood-soaked top Yousef had been wearing that night, as well as the blood-spattered Nike trainers he had on when he was stabbed. Another image shows a small rip in the left breast of his bubble coat, where the knife had gone in. The hole is small but its impact huge.
Jade told the M.E.N: "It just shows the devastation knife crime can cause. People don't understand how much people can bleed from one little stab wound. There's so much blood. If you look at his clothes and his trainers, it's what teenagers wear. It brings it home to me just how young he was when he was killed.
"I want parents to discuss this with their kids and if they see a different perspective kids might think differently about their own actions and their own families."
A jury acquitted Molnar from Hale, now 20, of murder and manslaughter in 2019, although he was handed a 16-month detention and training order after admitting possessing the knife which inflicted the fatal injury and lying to police at the scene. By their verdict, the jury accepted he acted in self-defence.
His co-defendant at the 2019 trial, another MGS student, Adam Chowdhary, now 19, from Hale Barns, who described Yousef as his 'best friend', was acquitted of perverting the course of justice. He was given a four-month detention order after admitting possession of a flick knife, one of two he claimed he and Yousef had jointly ordered online during a break from lessons at MGS.
Yousef's mother Debbie, 55, died in May, 2020, during lockdown. She had never recovered from Yousef's death and died 'of a broken heart', according to her family.
In her book, Jade described how she has kept and still looks at the clothes Yousef was wearing the day he was stabbed.
She writes: "Following the trial, Yousef’s blood-stained clothes, or rather, the clothes in which he died, had been released to us. He had been wearing his own long-sleeved grey top. But there was a The North Face bubble coat, and a pair of Stone Island Cargo pants, both far too expensive for Yousef to afford. We had presumed, since he had stayed over with Adam, he had borrowed his clothes the following day, the day of his death.
"The jacket had a vicious slash right through it, where he had been stabbed. Mum could not bear to look at the clothes, the fact that they belonged to someone who was by his side on the day when Yousef was stabbed was too much to take. It seemed too far-fetched, too lurid.
"But again, we were dealing with grief from different perspectives. For when Mum wasn’t around, I took the clothes out of the plastic wrapping, spread them across the kitchen table, and studied them for hours. Perhaps I was looking for answers, perhaps I was hoping for a connection with Yousef. Maybe I felt, somewhat ambitiously, that I could anaesthetise myself to the horror of knowing that my little brother had bled to death in this outfit.
"But every time I looked at them, the pain seemed even sharper, even fresher. And if I stared long enough at the clothes, they would often take on a shape and a life of their own, and reassemble into an image of my brother, staggering down Gorse Bank Road, clutching desperately, uselessly, at his bleeding chest."
She added: "I was trapped in a cycle of pain as raw as it was relentless. Yet I was drawn back to the clothes, like the video clips and the clothes in Yousef’s wardrobe. Time after time, I spread them out on the table, and I immersed myself in grief."
Later she writes: "We have found out, to our cost, that knives taint every section of society; even the richest, the brightest, the most fortunate. We need to talk to all children about knives, de-glamorise them and de-myth them, and show them the photos of Yousef’s forgotten school-bag, his redundant boxing gloves, his blood-stained white trainers. We need to tell them the painful truth."
Jade contributed to a Channel 4 documentary into the tragedy, Killed By A Rich Kid, which included police body-cam footage from the scene. The governor of Hindley Prison near Wigan was so moved by it she played it to some inmates, who invited Jade to talk a small group of prisoners on Friday.
"It was a group of prisoners who mentor others," she explained. "I've never been into a prison before. I had an image of them being cold, hardened criminals. But it wasn't like that at all. They were normal. They are trying to change, which is nice to see."
Among the inmates Jade spoke to was a 23-year-old from Stretford who had a year left of his sentence for a knife-related crime.
"He said the documentary had made him think and that you don't think when you are leading that life. It had made him think about his own family and the devastation knife crime causes. It made him think twice," said Jade.
The prisoners presented Jade with a £2,000 cheque, money they raised and which will go to Jade's foundation which seeks to raise awareness about knife crime as well challenging the inconclusive verdict of an inquest held in November. The Makki family, who had urged an unlawful killing finding, is seeking a judicial review to overturn the coroner's narrative verdict.
The Boy With A Pound In His Pocket by Jade Akoum, RRP £7.99 published by Mirror Books, is on sale April 28. Click here to order from Amazon.
