Exclusive: Brother of youngest knife victim David Idowu speaks out

David Idowu was the kind of boy teachers looked forward to having in their class.

He was a bright, funny, clever lad with an entrepreneurial streak and a fledgling business designing computer graphics.

David was only 14 years old when he died, stabbed in the chest and stomach on his way home from school, his bright red blood spilled on the uniform he was so proud of.

This week, his 18-year-old brother, another bright boy from the inner city, stood fearlessly in front of the Prime Minister and asked him why his brother had to die.

"I was brought up to know if you speak the truth there is nothing to fear," Peter Idowu says later in his darkened sitting room, the blinds pulled down against the outside world.

"My 14-year-old brother died only three miles from Downing Street, and I wanted Mr Brown to tell me why he got stabbed.
"He was not involved in any quarrels. He was not involved in any gang, so how could this happen to him? What did he do to deserve this?"

David's death is a brutal milestone... the youngest victim of the knife epidemic that is blighting Britain. And if the victims are getting younger, so too are the perpetrators.

In Cumbria yesterday a girl of 13 who stabbed a fellow pupil was placed on a 12-month referral order by magistrates and ordered to pay £200 compensation.

A baying mob had filmed the attack on their mobile phones shouting: "This is going on YouTube" as the girl took a craft knife from a classroom and attacked a 15-year-old boy in the playground.

And at the same time detectives are investigating claims that a 10-year-old boy threatened another child with a knife outside a primary school near Chelmsford, Essex. Nobody was killed. But David was not so lucky.

He died in hospital on July 7, almost three weeks after receiving his injuries in the attack five minutes walk from his home on the Tabard Estate in South East London.

Now the Idowus are waiting to bury their son - and waiting for the results of the post-mortem.
"David was the one who lit up the house and made everybody laugh," his older brother Peter says. "Without him our home is so quiet.

"My little brother was very close to David and he has taken it very hard. He is trying to be strong for everyone, but he is only 13."

His mother looks up with red-rimmed eyes from the photographs of David she is sifting through.

"This has got to stop," she says. "No more families should go through this pain."

On Tuesday Peter led hundreds of David's friends and family on a march through South London and across the River Thames to the door of No.10. "We are all backing the Daily Mirror anti-knife campaign," Peter says. "We have to be strong and say that no more young people can die on our streets. This is an emergency."

When the Idowu family were invited into Downing Street, Peter told Gordon Brown how he thought knife crime could be ended.

"The Prime Minister listened to me," he says. "He said I had some very good ideas.What's important now is that things change. He said he will tackle this problem of knives and guns and I hope he will."

Like his brother, David was a thoughtful, hardworking boy deeply worried about knife crime. "He thought about it a lot,"
Peter says. "He had written a speech about knives and guns on our streets that he was due to deliver at a school debating contest just before he died.

"David wanted it to have a good chance at the competition, so he gave it to my dad to read to check it over. My dad said it was so good he was going to take a day off work to see him deliver the speech."

Instead, on the day he should have spoken, David lay critically injured at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, stabbed two days earlier as he walked home in his Walworth Academy uniform.

This week, his family went bravely to the scene, where the railings are decorated with the blue-and silver striped tie of his school.