Teenage defendants 'mocked dead boy's mother' in court
The mother of a boy who was fatally stabbed said that one of the teenage defendants mocked her in court.
Yousef Makki, 17, was stabbed in the heart with a flick knife during an altercation with two friends in the upmarket village of Hale Barns in Cheshire, last March.
Debbie Makki, the boy's mother, said that during proceedings, she had to share a corridor with the defendants.
'One of them used to moonwalk past us and laugh, the other one just used to smirk at us,' she told the BBC.
Yousef, who was from a single-parent Anglo-Lebanese family from Burnage, south Manchester, had won a scholarship to the prestigious £12,000-a-year Manchester Grammar School.
The court heard that Yousef's friend, known as Boy A, stabbed him during a fight over a failed attempt to steal cannabis from a drug dealer.
The boy was cleared of murder and manslaughter after pleading that he acted in self-defence but admitted to possession of a knife.
He was last month found guilty of perverting the course of justice after giving a false account of the story to police and sentenced to 16 months at Manchester Crown Court in prison.
A second boy, known as Boy B, was given 4 months for possessing a knife.
Both will be released halfway through their sentences under supervision.
Neither of the defendants, from wealthy Cheshire families, can be named as they are under 18.
Mrs Makki said that she felt that in the trial process her family were 'treated like criminals' and 'felt pushed out of proceedings'.
'We were actually shown a video of Yousef dead on the floor and we weren't warned about any of it,' she said.
'The whole case was aimed at the fact that these boys were good boys from a good area, as if they were innocent babies, as if they couldn’t possibly do anything bad because they weren’t from a council estate.'
Police are now investigating footage showing Boy A making a stabbing motion while listening to rap music in a toilet.
The jury heard the stabbing was an “accident waiting to happen” as all three youths indulged in 'idiotic fantasies' playing middle class gangsters.
On the night Yousef was stabbed, Boy B arranged a £45 cannabis deal and the teenagers planned to rob the drug dealer.
The robbery went wrong and Yousef and Boy B fled leaving boy A to take a beating.
Boy A later pushed Yousef and punched him in the face, the court heard.
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He told the jury Yousef pulled out a knife and he responded by also taking out a knife in self defence and his victim was accidentally stabbed.
When police arrived on the night, Boy A falsely suggested that Yousef Makki had been stabbed by someone who drove off in a grey VW Polo, information which was circulated on the police network.
Despite the privileged backgrounds of both defendants they led 'double lives', the court heard, and that the tragedy was an 'accident waiting to happen'.
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