The defendant, now 17, used a Zombie knife to kill Louis Howard who’d turned up asking to speak to the teen’s mother
Louis Howard, who was stabbed to death(Image: Leicestershire Police)
A boy who stabbed a man in his home using a Zombie knife has been sent to youth detention after pleading guilty to manslaughter. And his mother and their next door neighbour were jailed at the same time.
The victim, Louis Howard, 35, had got drunk and high on cocaine and gone to see the boy’s mother at their home in Braunstone Frith in April. He was let in after knocking on the door. But an argument between the boy’s mother and Mr Howard began minutes later, with the woman refusing to let Mr Howard borrow her phone.
He was grabbing at her pockets demanding the phone and she was telling him to “get out” of the house in Braunstone Frith, Leicester. An audio recording from a neighbour’s CCTV then captured the sound of screaming as the boy entered the room and thrust a Zombie knife into Mr Howard’s chest, stabbing him with such force he also broke one of Mr Howard’s ribs.
Afterwards he told his screaming mother and sister: “Do you think it’s reasonable? To do that for a phone?”
The blade punctured Mr Howard’s heart and he walked to the bathroom and collapsed on his back and died from internal bleeding.
The boy’s younger siblings, both under 10, were in the house and his little sister witnessed the killing while the young boy had Mr Howard’s blood on him when emergency services arrived.
Both the boy’s mother and her friend lied to the police to protect the boy, with the mother telling officers Mr Howard had arrived at the house with the knife in his chest, while the neighbour pretended she had not seen the boy after the stabbing when she had really given him a change of clothes. She also pretended that her CCTV – which had formed a large part of the prosecution case – had recorded nothing of the incidents.
Blood-stained tracksuit bottoms and trainers that belonged to the boy were discovered at the neighbour’s address two days after the stabbing and the police also recovered the CCTV footage.
The boy was arrested within hours of the stabbing on Wednesday, April 9, and charged with murder. He initially claimed Mr Howard had been holding the knife at the time of the struggle, later saying Mr Howard had “walked onto the outstretched knife”, Mary Prior KC said at the sentencing hearing at Leicester Crown Court on Friday (October 10).
He went on trial in late September but on the second day of the murder trial he entered a guilty plea to the lesser charge of manslaughter on the basis of loss of control.
The boy’s mother and her friend, who lived next door, had been on trial in September alongside the boy but both pleaded guilty to assisting an offender during the first days of the trial. Both women are in their early 30s and cannot be named due to the ban on identifying the youth.
The court heard about the boy’s threats against another woman in the weeks before the killing. The 16-year-old boy had been in a relationship with a 36-year-old mother-of-nine, whose youngest child – born about four weeks before Friday’s sentencing hearing – was the killer’s son.
About a week before the stabbing there had been an incident in which the youth had been caught on CCTV threatening to kill his girlfriend and his unborn child. The woman also reported the boy for throttling and punching her and threatening to cut off her toes with a knife he was holding at the time.
The woman had gone to Leicestershire Police and the boy was “avoiding detection at the time” of the stabbing, Mrs Prior said. She played CCTV footage in which the boy could be heard to shout through the front door: “Open the door and I’ll knock you out.
“I’m going to kill you… I’m going to kill the baby.”
Mrs Prior also described evidence from messages between the defendants about the boy threatening to stab Mr Howard in the past. There was also a message in which Mr Howard told the mother that the boy was a “little junkie kid”.
Mrs Prior read out a victim personal statement from Mr Howard’s mother, Lisa Howard. In it, she described Mr Howard as a “gentle giant with a heart of pure gold”.
She said: “On April 9 the world was plunged into darkness and stood still.
“My heart was splintered into a million pieces. Life as I knew it no longer existed. The torment and torture are relentless, every second of every day.
“I will never accept this is my life now. No one should have to see their child’s body. His life was ripped from us in the cruellest way possible.
“My family will never get over this. We have been given a life sentence. We will never get over this hell we have been thrust into.”
Her son, Mr Howard’s younger brother, read out his victim statement in court, telling the boy: “You cowardly murdered my best friend in cold blood.
“You chose to be wicked and hope you live in torment. I hope your lives are filled with turmoil and torment.”
Sammuel Skinner KC, representing the boy, told Judge Timothy Spencer KC the boy’s guilty plea to manslaughter was on the basis there had been provocation. He said: “Mr Howard was no angel.” He added that Mr Howard had been arrested for possession of a blade in public in 2022 but never charged.
He said: “The violence that evening was initiated by Mr Howard – in drink and having consumed cocaine – towards [the boy’s] mother.”
He said his client, who is now 17, had been required to be a man when he was still only a child and had been “in turmoil”. He added the boy had been playing on his games console when Mr Howard arrived at the house.
He said after rushing upstairs to see what the commotion in the bedroom was he killed Mr Howard but had not set out to do so. Mr Skinner said Mr Howard “was not entirely blameless”.
The boy was sentenced to 21 months youth detention, his mother was jailed for 15 months and their neighbour was jailed for 21 months.
