'I wish I'd held my murdered son for that last minute'

The mother of a teenage schoolboy who was stabbed to death has spoken of the moment she watched paramedics fighting to save her son's life.

Alfie Lewis, 15, died after being stabbed in the heart and leg outside a primary school in Horsforth, Leeds, in November 2023.

Heather Lane said her son had only left the house 15 minutes before she received a call saying he had been attacked.

Speaking publicly for the first time since his death, she described racing to the scene to find medics carrying out CPR, saying she wished she had been able to hold her son.

"When we got there, there was just hundreds of people," she said

"[Alfie's brother] Antony had got there first, and when I got round the corner he was white, he'd been sick.

"Part of me just wishes I'd gone over and just held him for that last minute, but I didn't want to get in the way.

"He'd have been absolutely petrified, I know he would've been. He would have been wondering where I am.

"The ambulance were amazing, and it felt like it took so long, but it was only an hour from him being there and being pronounced dead at the hospital."

Bardia Shojaeifard, who was 14 at the time he stabbed Alfie, was convicted of murder in May and given a life sentence, with a minimum of 13 years.

During the trial, the court heard he had a "worrying interest in knives", with police finding several images on his phone of him holding them.

Ms Lane said more needed to be done to tackle knife crime, including tougher sentences for those caught carrying or using a blade.

"Alfie would never have carried a knife. Alfie's friends would never have carried a knife," she said.

"And that's why it's been such a shock in the community as well, because it's not something round here that you hear about.

"We need to change, because it's not fair that Alfie left the house for 15 minutes and never came home, and now we're left without him and I don't know how to live without him."

Ms Lane said she had chosen to speak about her son's death following the fatal stabbing of Harvey Willgoose in Sheffield.

Harvey, also 15, died after being stabbed at All Saints Catholic High School on 3 February.

"It was all over the world, Alfie's death, because it was such a shock," she said.

"And now it's happened in another school in Sheffield. Why has that happened?"

Later this year a new law to tighten restrictions around online knife sales are set to be introduced.

Dubbed Ronan's Law, after 16-year-old Ronan Kanda who was murdered in Wolverhampton in 2022, it will require retailers to report any bulk or suspicious knife purchases to police and see jail terms for selling weapons to under-18s increase from six months to two years.

Ms Lane, whose son was stabbed with a knife taken from a kitchen drawer, said she did not think it went far enough.

"It's not good enough," she said.

"If it was somebody in the government or somebody higher up, would the laws have been changed by now?

"I hope that we never have to find that out, but I believe that they would.

"The children deserve us to protect them, because that's what we're supposed to do as adults, and to protect them is to bring in stricter sentences.

"If you carry a knife you should be going to jail for a long time."

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