Only 4 years?

Another British travesty of justice

Two teenagers were sentenced to four years’ detention yesterday for killing a gifted IT expert after he objected to them throwing a chocolate bar into his car. Evren Anil, 23, was sitting with his sister at traffic lights in her car in Gipsy Hill, southeast London, when Patrick Rowe, 17, threw a half-chewed Lion bar through the vehicle’s open window. Mr Anil, a first-class honours graduate in IT, who had just started his dream job as a programme developer, made the fatal mistake of remonstrating with Rowe and his friend Dejon Thompson, 16. Mr Anil got out of the vehicle and threw the chocolate bar back at them, only for one of the boys to produce a 4in knife from his trousers.

As Elif Anil screamed, a knife was held to her brother’s throat and he was then punched in the face so hard that his skull was fractured and he suffered a haemorrhage. Mr Anil, who helped schoolchildren with maths in his spare time, died of severe head injuries eight days after the attack in August of last year.

An elderly passerby, Derek Porter, bravely tried to intervene after seeing one of the youths pull out a knife and threaten Mr Anil “as if challenging him like a gunfighter from a western film”, the Old Bailey was told. Another witness, Susan Hunt, said: “He fell straight to the floor, his body limp like a doll, hitting his head heavily against the kerb.”

Judge Ann Goddard lifted restrictions banning the teenagers from being identified and condemned their actions. She said: “Your yobbish and stupid behaviour escalated into you drawing a knife and then punching Evren Anil with such force that he fell and struck his head on the ground and died. He was a decent, good young man with a first-class degree with everything before him. “The loss to his family is impossible to describe. Their grief is unspeakable and I am very conscious that no sentence can bring him back or ever measure up to their loss. The tragedy is that it need not have happened, if you hadn’t started it or had had the courage to walk away.”

Ms Anil, 26, said it was a “vicious and callous attack” and branded the killers “heartless cowards”. In a victim statement she said she had contemplated suicide “to ease my pain” and that her older brother was still having psychiatric and medical treatment. “I have been unable to sleep at nights as the recollections give me nightmares,” she said. “I am no longer able to trust people and constantly feel afraid in the streets. I am scared of driving and being alone in my car. I always lock the doors, close my windows and get scared when I approach red lights – something that I never was worried about previously. I can’t even drive past the location where the incident happened as the area and recollection freak me out. I have to take an alternative route just to avoid passing it.”

She added: “I cannot describe the day-to-day agony and the sting of Evren’s untimely death. My mother still to this day looks in his bedroom and thinks she is going to find him there and believes that he is going to walk in any day through our front door. She misses him so much.”

Thompson and Rowe admitted manslaughter and knife possession at a hearing last month. Detective Inspector Justin Davies, of the investigating team, said: “Evren Anil was a decent, hard-working, public-spirited and well-loved young man with a bright future ahead of him. He decided on the day in question to challenge a random and pointless act of antisocial behaviour. That decision, tragically, cost him his life.”

Rowe, of Tottenham, North London, admitted throwing the chocolate bar and delivering the fatal blow to Mr Anil. It was he who carried the knife to the scene and gave it to Thompson, of Thornton Heath, southeast London, who threatened the victim and Mr Porter.

Mr Anil, who worked for the computer company Logica, was a keen footballer with Croydon City as well as an amateur actor. He was born in Turkey and moved to London at the age of three with his family, settling in Upper Norwood, southeast London.

Report here



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