On the day he murdered a fellow school pupil, Prabjeet Veadhesa, then 16, went to the post office to pick up a 22-in ninja blade he had ordered online using his mother’s ID to pass security checks.
The parcel was supposed to be delivered only to someone over the age of 18, but staff failed to ask the teenager for any ID on collection. It was one of nearly 30 knives and machetes he had bought this way over several months, selling many of them to friends at school for a profit.
A few hours later, on the evening of 29 June last year, he used the ninja sword to stab 16-year-old Ronan Kanda through the heart from behind as he was walking home from a friend’s house in Wolverhampton. He was yards away from his front door, and died on the pavement despite efforts from paramedics to save him.
“The fact that kids can get hold of knives so easily, it’s like click and collect – that really shocked us,” said Ronan’s sister, Nikita, 23. “I don’t think a lot of people know that you can do that. The post office just handed it out. If they had checked his ID maybe that would have changed the whole course of the day.”
Ronan’s family have launched a campaign to ban the sale of all bladed articles online and hundreds of people recently joined them on a march against knife crime through Wolverhampton. Pooja Kanda, Ronan and Nikita’s mother, has written an open letter to Rishi Sunak calling for the government to go a step further than current considerations to ban some machetes and large knives.
“Sellers state these knives are collectors’ items, sports equipment, or for outdoor enthusiasts, but the truth is that these knives are directly linked to rising knife crime which is killing our youth and leaving so many families and communities devastated,” the letter reads.
In the year ending March 2022, offences involving a knife or sharp instrument were 34% higher than in 2010-11, and 9% higher than the year before.
Ronan’s death was a case of mistaken identity in a schoolyard argument that spilled out into violence on the street – one of his friends had been the intended target.
Veadhesa, along with his friend Sukhman Shergill, 17, had gone out that evening equipped with a set of ninja blades and a machete to exact revenge for a fight at school. They jumped out of a car and chased Ronan down his street as he was returning home from picking up a PlayStation controller from a friend, believing him to be someone else, before stabbing him repeatedly.
West Midlands police described the killing as “an unbelievably callous and shocking case of mistaken identity”, and the pair were subsequently found guilty of murder and jailed for life for a minimum of 16 and 18 years respectively.
The Kanda family do not believe the teenagers have ever shown true remorse for what they did.
“This is the mentality, and it makes me wonder what we’re fighting against. These youths are such reckless, heartless people,” said Pooja Kanda. “And they are our children, they are the children of our society, they are the children of another mother. How can they be so heartless?”
Pooja said hearing the details of Veadhesa’s obsession with weapons, and the ease with which he had collected so many, had prompted her to speak out about it.
“It makes me angry and upset. If the options of knives and swords were not available to them online, my son would be here today. Why do they need weapons? The world is not scary. They are making the world scary,” she said.
“And I keep seeing the same thing happening to other children. How can we sit down and let it happen over and over and over again? We need to get this in front of the prime minister, and tell him we’re not accepting it. OK, my child is gone, but I’m not accepting it, even if you’re OK with it.”
The family have put their home up for sale as they struggle to leave the house knowing they have to walk past the spot where Ronan lost his life, just five days after finishing his GCSEs.
On the evening of his death, Pooja had been at a meditation class and rushed home when she heard the news someone had been stabbed in their street. “I never thought it could be Ronan, he’s not a troubled child, he’s not in a gang,” she said. “He was a good kid who liked playing on his PlayStation. We were a homely family. We never thought it could happen to us.”
A Post Office spokesperson said the branch in Walsall where Veadhesa collected the weapons “was run at the time by one of our former retail partners”.
“We send our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Ronan Kanda,” they said. “The Royal Mail Group have guidance in place about dangerous objects that all Post Offices are required to follow. An internal review, involving the new retail operator that took over the branch late last year, is taking place.”
