Knife culture claims another life
5:56pm Wednesday 27th August 2008
Another young man has been stabbed to death in Walthamstow.
That makes 24 across London this year, and three in Waltham Forest in the last couple of months alone. This is the sort of news that clings to you after you leave the office and sits sickeningly in the pit of your stomach. This boy was just 18 years old and had, to coin the old phrase, his whole life ahead of him. It just seems like such a gargantuan, incomprehensible waste. There's no way to understand what happened the night he died or what was going through the mind of his killer. I can only assume, and hope, that whoever inflicted the fatal wound didn't understand either - that they didn't fully comprehend what would happen when they used that knife.
The scene of the crime is now festooned with bouquets, which look oddly cheery, set against the greenery of Walthamstow town square. Teenagers with hooded tops pulled low over their heads kept silent vigil in the morning after it happened and a handful remained on Tuesday when I visited the scene myself. I spoke to a few of them and they all said the same thing: Charles Junior "CJ" Hendricks was a popular, ambitious boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And reading some of the tributes left to him, it was easy to see just how well-liked he was and how much his death had affected the people that knew him, even in passing.
The question that remains is why this happened. Of course, I'm no expert - far from it, in fact - but it seems to me that this rash of violence sprang almost from nowhere and has been constantly growing over the last few years into a seething, uncontrollable monster. It's a sorry state of affairs when teenagers are in the position to wipe one another out with knives and guns. At any rate, I'll stop myself there at the risk of pontificating. I just wonder when and how all this will end.