What turned 12-year-old right into a machete killer, reveals PAUL BRACCHI

Staring out from the front pages and news websites this week was a menacing hooded figure in a black balaclava; all you could see of the person behind the urban uniform was his eyes.

Even his hands were hidden. There was a reason for this. He was clutching a machete, we now know, tucked in a leg of his tracksuit bottoms.

Just hours after posting the sinister selfie, he pulled out the deadly weapon and, along with an accomplice, butchered 19-year-old student Shawn Seesahai with such ferocity that the 17-inch blade plunged into his back went through his lung, cut two chambers of his heart and nearly came out of his chest.

His skull was also broken after he was kicked, punched and stamped on mercilessly in the prolonged and unprovoked attack in a Wolverhampton park in November.

It was reminiscent of the kind of brutal assaults which have become synonymous with postcode gangs, typically made up of teenagers and young men, waging bloody turf wars around Britain.

But the culprits here hadn’t even reached puberty yet; they were both children aged 12.

This week they were unanimously convicted of murder at Nottingham Crown Court.

‘He didn’t even look 12,’ said a woman who lived on the same estate as the boy who owned the machete. ‘He was small for his age, slight, skinny and he had a baby face.’

Her description is hard to square with the horror that unfolded in the suburbs of the city less than a year ago.

The ultra-violence displayed then is all too common in today’s world but not since the murder of Jamie Bulger in 1993 by ten-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, have the perpetrators been as young as the pair who murdered Shawn Seesahai.

The same question asked in the aftermath of the Jamie Bulger tragedy — the toddler was beaten to death with bricks and an iron bar then left across a railway track on Merseyside — is being asked now: were the boys, both from mixed race families, who killed Shawn and cannot be named because of their age, born wicked or made so by their backgrounds?

Not every child who grows up in a dysfunctional, chaotic, broken home becomes a danger to society but they are much more likely to if they do.

The single mother of the boy who shared the sinister selfie has at least ‘five or six kids’ and his father — who is not named on his son’s birth certificate — is either currently in prison or has been to prison, neighbours told us. The youngster, they said, was living with his grandmother because his mum ‘had mental health problems’ and could not look after him.

He was allowed to stay out until all hours and generally ran amok, by all accounts, stealing, causing criminal damage and getting mixed up in the local drug scene with much older youths.

The upbringing of his accomplice was, by comparison, more normal, although the bar couldn’t have been much lower.

According to relatives of the second boy, his parents do not live together due to unusual domestic circumstances.

His mother was looking after him and his younger brother at a housing association flat in Wolverhampton, while his father is based 30-odd miles away in Walsall where he helps care for his own sick father. A friend, however, said the couple had simply split up.

‘Joint enterprise’ murders involving children, where a ‘number of persons act together’, are extremely rare.

But the number of children convicted of murder (on their own) has quadrupled in recent years, from seven children, aged 12 to 17, in 2016, to 28 in 2021, followed by 34 in 2022 and 26 last year, according to Ministry of Justice data.

In the West Midlands policing area, children as young as ten have been caught with knives, according to new figures revealed through a freedom of information request, and when judged by the size of the population, the region has a higher rate of knife crime than London and Manchester.

This is the wider narrative behind the murder of Shawn Seesahai, who had travelled to the UK from the Caribbean island of Anguilla to have cataract surgery, which was not available at home, and to further his education.

Shawn, sitting on a bench with a friend in Stowlawn playing fields, a popular local venue, was discussing Christmas plans on the fateful evening.

He was, according to the prosecution, ‘utterly defenceless’ and had ‘done nothing to offend the two boys’ who, the court heard, threatened him nonetheless.

When the machete was produced he tried to run away but tripped and was set upon as he lay defenceless on the ground.

By the time police arrived shortly after 8pm and began to carry out CPR, Shawn, who had dreams of becoming an engineer, had died from his severe injuries.

His assailants knew each other through school and had been friends for at least two years. Known to police, they blamed each other for the murder.

The terrible events of November 13 last year will occupy the minds of criminologists and psychologists for years to come.

Invariably, in crimes of this nature, there is a dominant partner and a follower. In the case of Jamie Bulger, the dominant one was thought to be Thompson.

Given the details of Shawn’s murder, which emerged during the month-long trial, and what our own inquiries have uncovered about their backgrounds, it is hard not to believe that it was the boy with the machete who played the lead role in Stowlawn park.

It was this boy who coolly washed the blade with bleach in the immediate aftermath, who refused to give up the name of the ‘friend of a friend’ who sold him the murder weapon for £40 and whose clothes were heavily bloodstained — suggesting he was the one who attacked Shawn.

He was heavily influenced by drill rapper SJ (real name Jayden O’Neill-Crichlow), it emerged at the trial. O’Neill-Crichlow is himself serving life for a machete murder in Wood Green, north London, in 2019.

Among his ‘songs’ is Youngest In Charge which includes the lyric ‘got my Rambz’ [knife] all bleached up’.

After being given a formal caution advising him of his rights, the boy remained unfazed. His response: ‘What murder? Why would I kill someone? I haven’t done anything.’

It was the behaviour of a seasoned criminal, not a 12-year-old.

At the time of the murder, home was his grandmother’s two-bedroom council flat just a minute or so from the park, bordered by a primary school, where Shawn was cut down.

The grandmother appears to have fulfilled few of the in loco parentis duties that he, more than any child, needed.

A video posted on Instagram when he was nine is particularly shocking in this respect.

The woman is sitting on the sofa in her dressing gown as he raps along to Loading by Central Cee about ‘pokers’ (slang for knife) and ‘plugs’ (drug dealers) with a bandana on his head and over his mouth while making a gun sign with his hand.

Central Cee, real name Oakley Neil Caesar-Su, has previously admitted being a drug dealer.

Social workers and police were regular visitors to the flat.

Residents said it had become an Aladdin’s cave of stolen goods. On one occasion officers raided the property and recovered ‘six or seven big tellies’ as well as boxes and bags of items ‘enough to fill a van’.

Neighbour Mareusz Widek woke to find his shed had been broken into and his scooter gone, no sooner had they arrived in the once quiet cul-de-sac last year.

‘It cost me £2,000 and I needed it to get to and from work,’ said factory worker Mr Widek, 37, a Pole who has lived in the UK for 20 years. ‘A few days later, his gran came over and admitted he had stolen it and sold it on but she didn’t apologise. It was insured and I got my money back.’

The legacy of his crime spree is apparent in this corner of the estate. One property is shielded by barbed wire and a metal grille, installed by the owner to keep him out, and wires in some street lamps have been pulled out to stop lighting in spots where drug dealing was taking place.

Locals told of seeing the boy with a group, aged from around ‘11 to 18 or 19’, exchanging ‘packets of white powder’. This may be one of the reasons, aside from bravado, he rarely, if ever, went out without a knife, which was found hidden in the frame of his bed after the murder.

The boy is not the only member of the family to get into serious trouble. At their previous address in another part of Wolverhampton, a neighbour whose garden backed on to their house, heard his grandmother shout: ‘Get this f****** gun out of the house.’

It was over a year ago, he said, and afterwards police raided the property and arrested a young man, aged about 18, believed to be the boy’s older brother.

The grandmother’s daughter —the 12-year-old’s mother — sometimes came to the house.

‘I’ve known her since we were teenagers and she would fly off the handle over anything,’ said an old friend who happened to live round the corner. ‘She was unable to control her temper and would often choose the wrong people to lose it with, leading to fights and problems with the police. The cops would regularly come knocking on the door.’

Now 35, she was pregnant for the first time when she was around 17 and has recently given birth to ‘her fifth or sixth’ child.

She was the victim of domestic abuse at the council house she has now moved out of.

Her next door neighbour recalled how she would sometimes appear with her ‘face covered in bruises’ following screaming matches with her partner.

This, then, is the dystopian world which exists in many parts of inner-city Britain that produced one of the boys who killed Shawn Seesahai.

So what of the other boy? He undoubtedly came from a better place. On June 2, just seven days before the trial ended, his mother, a social worker ironically, attended a music festival in Birmingham.

‘She was in good spirits,’ said an acquaintance. ‘She was there with some of her friends. She said she had been at the trial and it was going well for her son. She told me: “The case is looking good. He might get off.”’

She was a ‘good mum’, said the friend, who added that the boy and his younger brother were ‘well behaved’ and ‘held the door open for the friend when she had shopping’. Their mother slept in the living room of her housing association flat because there were only two bedrooms.

Her husband, a welder, came to visit but the friend believed they were no longer together.

His family insist, however, they were only living apart because her husband has to be in Walsall to help care for his own his father, a stroke victim who also has cancer and vascular dementia.

‘My grandson is not from a broken home,’ said his paternal grandmother, a former lay visitor to prisons.

In 1993, at the trial of Thompson and Venables, the psychiatrist who interviewed them addressed questions including this fundamental one: did ‘Boy A’ and ‘Boy B’ — as they were referred to before the judge allowed them to be named — know the difference between right and wrong? The answer, she said, was ‘yes.’

The two boys at the centre of the Wolverhampton case could also be identified when they are sentenced next month.

But many might think they were not the only ones responsible for what happened to Shawn Seesahai in a Wolverhampton park — and that Britain’s increasingly nihilistic culture of drugs and violence is also to blame.

• Additional reporting: Nic North and Ross Slater