A half-empty packet of chewing gum, a crumpled fiver, a card holder, and a lottery ticket. It is the unremarkable contents of a pocket, getting dog-eared with age, yet Margaret and Barry Mizen treasure it.
This is what was in their 16-year-old son Jimmy’s pocket when he was murdered on May 10, 2008, 15 years ago next month.
It is not an easy collection to view.
The schoolboy’s blood has stained the gum packet, a lasting reminder of his violent death at the hands of Jake Fahri, a known local bully, who attacked him senselessly in a bakery near their homes in South East London.
But the lottery ticket is a moving reminder of Jimmy’s joy that Saturday, bought with pure excitement because he had turned 16 just the day before. It was the first he could legally buy.
“I still buy a ticket every week and use his numbers,” reveals Margaret.
But as the couple and their remaining eight children look towards Jimmy’s anniversary, they now have another event to brace themselves for.
On Friday, Fahri will face the Parole Board and learn whether he is to be released. Adding to the Mizens’ apprehension, Fahri’s parents, they believe, still live just 500 yards from their home.
The Mizens have every justification for hoping Fahri is never freed.
The youth, already known to the family for mugging and beating one of Jimmy’s older brothers, had become enraged as he tried to barge past Jimmy in the bakery to buy a sandwich, grabbing a glass dish from the counter and throwing it at his head. It shattered and a one-and-a-half inch shard slit an artery in Jimmy’s neck. He bled to death in his brother’s arms.
Yet his mum and dad are disarmingly accepting of the possibility – and say they would even consider meeting him.
The day after Jimmy’s death, Margaret declared she did not feel anger, and the couple forgave his killer. Today, they say that
forgiveness still stands.
“Of course I still forgive him,” Margaret, 70, says. “I forgave Jake Fahri because I had a need to smile again, I knew if I didn’t forgive him I wouldn’t smile again.”
She adds they can only trust the Board. “We are not fearful,” she insists. “Maybe there is apprehension. Technically we could bump into him. But we have to put that to one side otherwise we’d go crazy, I’m not going to allow that to destroy me.
“Let’s hope he has changed his life around and when he comes out he won’t be the angry young man he was.
“If we don’t accept that he will come out, it will make our lives even harder.”
Barry, 71, adds what is most important is not when Fahri comes out, but who he is. “Does he accept responsibility? We don’t know,” he says. “Does he feel remorse? We don’t know. To us the important thing is, is he still a danger to the public?”
He, too, holds no anger. He says: “It took me a while, but I have never felt any grudge or a sense of revenge at all.”
The couple, practising Catholics, have chosen not to attend the hearing, adjourned for over a year.
They have submitted a statement and requested an exclusion zone around their home and no direct contact from Fahri.
“But we have left the door open,” explains Barry. “Although the only way would be through the offender manager to the Probation Service, to us.
“We wouldn’t dismiss meeting him, but it would be a family decision.”
Would Jimmy support them? The couple, sitting in the home where he learnt to walk, where his first day of school photo and childish drawings are framed, smile. “Knowing the kind of character Jimmy was, I think he would be very happy with us,” says Margaret.
The teenager, who they remember was “always happy”, was about to start GCSEs. On the Saturday he died, he went for breakfast with his older brother Tommy, and then met another, Harry, popping into the local Three Cooks bakery near their home in Lee, South East London.
Fahri, then 19, barged them, and when Jimmy politely asked him to go around, Fahri became furious.
After the attack Harry called Tommy, who arrived in time to cradle his brother. Fahri fled.
Margaret, called by a friend, raced to the shop. “Our son was holding him, he said ‘Mum, he’ll be OK, go back’, and I did what he said, and then fainted,” she recalls of that blur.
Police removed everyone just before Barry arrived. They next saw their son behind a glass screen in the mortuary, unable to touch him.
Softly, Margaret says: “That was perhaps the worst day of our lives.”
She thanks God for the couple’s last abiding memory of their gentle, 6ft 4in son on his birthday night.
“We both held him tight and told him how much we loved him and were proud of him, and he told us how much he loved us,” she recalls.
The Mizens’ ability to forgive made the reports of Jimmy’s death particularly memorable. For Margaret, it was nearly instantaneous, but for Barry, it was a longer process. “There was anger in the early days,” he admits. “We had a punch bag in the garden. But we weren’t screaming words of hate or anger.
“In the end, what do we mean by forgiveness? This is something we do primarily for ourselves.”
Fahri was convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 14 years. He never looked at the Mizens in court.
The family coped by focusing on Jimmy, and now share their memories of him with their six grandchildren.
Seven-year-old Ray Jimmy talks often about his uncle and Margaret shows me his latest sketch of balloons and a sunflower with Jimmy’s name. “When we go to the beach we always collect a stone for the cemetery.”
It is to the cemetery the whole family will go on the anniversary, and then back to the house for a barbecue.
There is a lightness to how they carry their grief, while holding Jimmy “totally in their hearts”.
Soon after his death they set up the Mizen Foundation, spending their weeks visiting schools and prisons spreading the message of forgiveness.
“I would love to think we had brought change, but I don’t know,” says Margaret. “There is still so much violence on our streets. But it makes us more determined to carry on.”
This is their memorial to Jimmy.
During lockdown the couple burned the majority of his possessions in the garden. It was a respectful, “special”, ceremony, a letting go – but not of their boy.
“In everything we do, we eat, breathe, Jimmy,” says Margaret. “It’s just how it is.”
* Join Walking For Jimmy on May 27, when hundreds will walk London’s 21 bridges in his memory and to raise funds for The Mizen Foundation. You can also volunteer. For more information visit mizenfoundation.org
