Sarfraz Manzoor

This is from today’s Times, a very poignant piece by Fiona Hamilton about the death by stabbing of Elliot Guy. Its hard to know how to make any sense of random violence. Its hard to know what lessons to draw from the bleak reality that our hold on life is so fragile. What is so heart breaking about the piece, which is why I was moved to reproduce it below is the palpable sense of unfairness, and the tragic finality which means that there is no second chance, no repeat performance. In one slashing moment of madness everything you know, everything you loved, everything you were and everything you will ever be is taken away forever.
Here is the article:

The handmade cabinet in three-month-old Eleanor’s bedroom is clearly the product of fine craftsmanship, yet it has no handles and lacks a final polish. For although her father spent weeks carving it expertly as a gift for his baby daughter, he will never get the chance to finish it.

Elliot Guy intended the cabinet to be the first of many presents to his beloved little girl. It will instead serve as a memento of a father whom she will never know.

Last Friday night, on one of the rare occasions he had been parted from Eleanor since her birth in April, Elliot dropped in on a party in North London. His long-term partner, Eleanor’s mother Amy Smith, presumes that he was looking for a chance to have a dance. Elliot, she remembers, loved nothing more than being at the centre of the dancefloor.

But the evening, which had begun so pleasantly with a few drinks and a laugh with friends, ended with the 27-year-old being rushed away in an ambulance. Stabbed in the neck, Elliot died in the Whittington Hospital at 4am on Saturday, the latest victim of knife crime in the capital.

“Towards the person who has done this, I don’t feel anything,” says Amy, who is sitting on the sofa in the couple’s front room. She looks exhausted far beyond the normal crushing tiredness of a new mother. Her eyes are red and, as she tells her story, Adriel Leff, Elliot’s best friend, comforts her as she comforts the baby, who is wrapped in a tiny white blanket.

“If it was one of Elliot’s friends I would hate them, I would really hate them, because they knew the value of his life. They knew how much it was worth. But this man or woman - whoever it is that has done this - their life must be worthless. They must not value life at all, because they failed to understand that Elliot’s life was so worthwhile.”

Amy and Elliot met six years ago in a London club. She smiles when she remembers how she saw him dancing that night: “He would close his eyes and sway to the music. He disappeared into his own world. He would be the last person standing on the dancefloor, you couldn’t drag him away.”

Amy, a regional director for Chesterton, a luxury property company, became pregnant unexpectedly last year. Elliot was overjoyed - he had finally found his calling. Amy smiles, then wipes away tears, as she describes the special relationship that Elliot shared with his baby.

“He wanted to be a stay-at-home dad right from the beginning. He loved his little girl, he wouldn’t be apart from her. He sang to her continually - and she responded to him.”

Even when Amy was at home and able to bathe Eleanor, Elliott would hover nearby with a towel, anxious to help. Now, without him, her friend Jenny arrives to help with the bathing.

“Her first smile was on Father’s Day - she smiled right at him. He called her Babalina. They had a special connection ... it was amazing. He really was meant to be a father.”

During the pregnancy Elliot, a builder, had been taking a course on fine furniture-making at Devon farm. He refused to complete the course without Eleanor by his side, so for the second month of her life, the trio lived in the South West.

“At least I have happy memories of those times,” Amy says. “We took her to the beach, to Cheddar Gorge. Elliot wanted Ellie to learn about nature. He always said that she’d never be one of those fat kids, she was too active.

“He always wanted to be a father. He wanted lots of children - he was at his happiest.”

In mid-June the family moved back to Ealing, West London, and Amy returned to work. She was to be the breadwinner, Elliot the stay-at-home parent. The arrangement worked for them both. “I’d come home and he would tell me what she’d picked up, what they had been up to,” she says. “He would take her for walks and point out the different types of tree - he loved wood, that was his craft. He was so happy. He loved spending time with her.

“We had plans - more kids, for sure. He wanted to decorate, we were going to travel. Elliot didn’t leave England until he was 19 but once he realised what a world there was out there, he wanted to see it all. These were big, long-term plans.”

Elliot and Amy had found the perfect place to raise Eleanor. Their two-storey brick home, barely half a mile from the bustling streets of Ealing, is surrounded by greenery.

Photographs of Elliot, Amy and Eleanor are scattered throughout the house: on holiday in Kenya, decorating their home, Elliot laughing with his mates, Elliot cradling Eleanor.

With a green outside the door and a park just a stone’s throw away, the area seemed ideal for bringing up a young child - and for walking Sam, Elliot’s energetic dog. It was markedly different from the streets of Tufnell Park, North London, where Elliot grew up. His father died when he was young and the family never had much money. But theirs was a welcoming home, and Elliot was close to his mother and three siblings. He was especially close to his brother Lewis, the youngest at 16.

It was an incident involving Lewis, who still lives in Tufnell Park with Elliot’s mother, that brought the issue of knife crime into their middle-class idyll.

“The day Ellie was born, Elliot got a call from Lewis saying that he was scared,” says Amy. “A gang had been following him around. He was scared that they could be carrying a knife, and he believed they were after him.”

Lewis came to live with his brother and Amy until the assumed danger died down, but Elliot did not stop worrying about him. Only last week, he told Amy that he was concerned about Lewis because the area was rife with knife crime.

“Elliot still went out in that area because he knew so many people,” says Amy. “I told him that he should watch out for himself, too. He said: ‘Who’s going to stab me? I’m big [6ft 2in and 12st], people would be afraid. That’s never going to happen’.”

Just a few days later, Elliot had become another London knife crime statistic. He died on the same day that 18-year-old Frederick Moody was murdered - the 21st teenager to die violently on the streets of the capital this year.

Police have promised zero tolerance; politicians have proposed various measures that they claim will tackle the root causes of the problem. With almost every day bringing another untimely death, knife and gun crime have dominated the headlines. But Elliot’s death is particularly tragic because he had never been in trouble and was not involved with gangs. That the attack took place inside a house is also unusual: most young victims of this sort of crime are attacked on the street.

The Metropolitan Police have arrested two men aged 41 and 30, and a woman aged 39, in connection with Elliot’s death. They have been bailed pending further inquiries.

Police have appealed for witnesses but the circumstances surrounding the murder are a mystery. Elliot had attended the party with his cousin Alfy, but the pair were not together when he was stabbed. It is unclear whether they knew many people there, but according to friends, parties in Tufnell Park are often open-house affairs. Elliot and his family were well known in the area, they say, and would have been welcome.

Amy says that she wants to speak out about Elliot’s death in the hope that it sends out a simple message: knife crime transcends age, race, class and postcodes.

“We’re a typical middle-class family in England. Elliot’s dad is Jamaican, his mother is white English,” she says. “This stuff isn’t colour-related, it’s just random. He was never caught up in gangland violence - he detests violence. He comes from a good family. I come from a good family.”

Amy admits that it sounds like a cliché, but calls Elliot a gentle giant. While she is baffled by the circumstances of his death, she is sure that he would never have provoked anyone.

Elliot’s friend Adriel, who had known him since he was 13, agrees: “He was a big guy but he wasn’t into fighting. He didn’t need to prove himself. If anyone was hot-headed in a group, he would say ‘leave it’. He would be the one to calm things down.”

It seems that Elliot didn’t realise how serious his injury was. At first he wanted to get a taxi home, but was persuaded to go to hospital instead. He died surrounded by friends - but without his partner and daughter, who were visiting family in the North of England. “While he knew he was injured, he had no idea what was happening,” says Amy. “He just slipped away.”

Two days earlier Elliot had visited Adriel. The pair chatted and listened to music quietly so they wouldn’t wake Eleanor. As Elliot talked to his friend about his baby and plans for the future, Adriel was impressed: “I thought, ‘I’ve known him for so long and he’s really blossomed’. The striking thing to me was how much he had changed in the past few years. He never got an easy ride in life - not that he was bitter - but he had come into his own. He wanted to do something special with his life. He would have.”