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"If we had stayed in Sierra Leone she would be alive today": Father of afro comb murder victim speaks of his guilt
(September 01, 2012)"If we had stayed in Sierra Leone she would be alive today": Father of afro comb murder victim speaks of his guilt
"I’m the one responsible, because I brought her to the UK. I cannot sleep. I’ve thought about suicide, it’s too much to bear," says father of Julie Sheriff
Julie Sheriff started her life in war-torn Sierra Leone, one of the world’s most volatile countries.
So when her father Raouf saw an opportunity to get her away from her dangerous African homeland to start a new life in Britain, he grabbed it.
But today, as he struggles to cope with Julie’s brutal murder at the hands of a teenage girl, former policeman Raouf says moving to the UK was the worst decision of his life.
“All my hopes and dreams of bringing Julie here have been shattered,” he says. “If we had stayed in Sierra Leone she would be alive today. I wanted to bring her here for a better life, but now she has no life at all.”
Julie died last September at just 16 after five months in a coma. During a petty row she was stabbed in the temple with the spiked handle of her own Afro comb by violent tearaway Rebecca Douglas, who was jailed for murder this week.
Raouf, 39, says: “I’m the one responsible, because I brought her to the UK. I cannot sleep. I’ve thought about suicide, it’s too much to bear.”
Julie’s life in Sierra Leone, where she lived in a refugee camp, was overshadowed by poverty. Raouf, who split from Julie’s mother Teneh, looked after her at weekends. He knew people who lived in the UK and arranged for her to move to London to live with a guardian in 2006.
“I wanted her to get a good education and to make us proud,” he says. After a few months Raouf joined his daughter to live in Britain because she had been taken into care. He says: “Once I joined her she settled down. She was going to school and making friends.”
But not the sort of friends Raouf wanted for her. “I told her these girls were no good for her, but she would tell me, ‘Dad, don’t worry.’ Nevertheless I told her I wasn’t happy about them coming to our house any more.”
But one day Raouf came home to find the girls at their small flat in Hackney, East London. An argument had broken out over a missing £5 note. “They were pulling and slapping and screaming at each other,” he says. “I asked them to leave and I hoped that would be the end of it.”
But the next night, the girls came back. There were seven or eight of them, throwing rocks at Julie’s bedroom window.
Raouf says they were “manic and bloodthirsty”, threatening to kill Julie. Raouf recognised one of the girls as Rebecca Douglas. Julie was hysterical and Raouf called the police. But by the time they got there the girls had vanished. And with no CCTV in the area, the police left.
Raouf, who has now filed an official complaint with the Independent Police Complaints Commission, says: “I was a policeman for 15 years in Sierra Leone and I would never have walked away from something like that. I knew these girls’ names and addresses. I at least expected them to tell them to leave Julie alone. Instead they decided to ignore us.”
The threats intensified and it was months before Julie was brave enough to leave the flat again. One day last May she headed to Clapham in South London to meet a new friend.
“I said, ‘Be safe, let God be with you.’ She told me she’d be OK, and then she left. I had no idea that would be the last time Julie would ever speak to me.”
The next time Raouf saw his daughter, she was lying unconscious in a hospital bed. When he heard about the attack, he was devastated to discover what Douglas had used as a weapon.
“Julie used to go everywhere with that comb,” he says.
Douglas, then just 15, had been sleeping rough with friends and bumped into Julie in Clapham. She grabbed her comb and stabbed Julie in the shoulder and through the temple.
Julie collapsed and fell into a coma which lasted until her death from a cardiac arrest five months later. Douglas was arrested the next day and was sentenced to a minimum of 10 years this week. Watching CCTV footage of the attack during the trial was too much for Raouf to bear.
“They played it over and over again and I had to leave the room,” he says. “Julie didn’t stand a chance. I’ve never seen a person act like that, even when I fought in the war in Sierra Leone.”
To add to the tragedy, Julie’s mum was denied entry to the country for Julie’s funeral.
Now, with the trauma of the trial finally behind him, Raouf must try to pick up the pieces of his life for the sake of his younger daughter Favour, three, and baby son John, eight months.
But the grief makes it hard. He says: “I can’t stop thinking how I brought her here for a better life only for this to happen.”