Unknown to Fatoumatta Hydara and her two young daughters as they slept in their beds in November last year, their nextdoor neighbour, Jamie Barrow, poured petrol through their letterbox and set fire to it, before calmly walking away and taking his dog out. Their flat was soon consumed by flames. The children, three-year-old Fatimah and one-year-old Naeemah, along with their mother, died of smoke inhalation.
It was an appalling crime, made even more incomprehensible as it also appears to be motiveless.
During the three-week trial at Nottingham crown court, the jury were initially told Barrow had a grudge against the family as he believed they were leaving bags of rubbish in the alleyway. The court was shown emails and heard telephone recordings of the complaints he had made to the council about the issue.
Police have also confirmed the incident was initially recorded as a hate crime.
When he gave evidence, Barrow said he started the fire in the early hours of 20 November because he had discovered as a teenager that fire had a calming effect on him, particularly when his mental health was suffering.
He told a psychiatrist: “When it goes up, it is always a sense of release … like the stress is going. The more it goes, the more mesmerised I get.”
He said he did not know why he chose Hydara’s flat, but claimed he had not known the family were inside, and would not have started the fire if he did.
“I can’t explain why I picked the victim’s flat. I have got no explanation for that. It wasn’t a thought as much as it was an impulse,” he told the court.
Barrow had been diagnosed with a personality disorder, and was regularly taking antidepressants, but stopped taking anti-psychotic medicine shortly before the fire due to the side-effects.
He said he had suffered emotional, physical and sexual abuse as a child, and had spent some time living with his grandmother before being sent to live in foster homes where he became disruptive, violent and angry.
He had long had a problem with alcohol and on the night of the fire he drank at least eight cans of beer before he took petrol from his motorbike, poured it through the family’s letterbox and then set fire to a tissue to set it ablaze.
Barrow said “the blowback was huge” and took him by surprise, but he simply watched it for a few minutes before taking his dog for a walk. He returned to the flats to find his neighbours gathered outside and repeatedly asked a police officer if he was allowed into his flat to get some dog food.
When a housing officer later spoke to him, he expressed concern about potential smoke damage to his flat and whether he would be relocated.
Barrow handed himself in to police a few days later, and pleaded guilty to manslaughter in April. But he consistently denied knowing the family were at home, and the murder case hinged on whether the jury would believe this claim.
The prosecution alleged Barrow would have seen light coming from the flat and heard the noise of the children, described as “loud and excited” by Hydara’s mother, who could hear them in the background as she spoke on the phone to her daughter earlier that evening.
The family were on the brink of starting a new life in the US to join Hydara’s husband and the children’s father, Aboubacarr Drammeh, who had spent the past three years securing his wife and children a visa to join him. They had a meeting at the US embassy on 29 November, which would have been the final step in the process.
Drammeh described how he flew straight back to the UK after hearing the news of the fire, and spent his 40th birthday in a mortuary viewing their bodies.
“I had to go in there and see the bodies. That was just so hard,” he said. “I spoke to Hydara on that Saturday night [before the fire] at about midnight. We joked among ourselves and kept talking about the upcoming trip and about her coming to America.
“We just wanted to bring the kids up to be role models and good citizens. We wanted to move to the US but, regardless of where we are in the world, the most important thing to us was to give them a better life and a good education.”
