Lisa Theobald has thrown her support behind a brand new anti-knife crime campaign by South Yorkshire Police and opened up about losing her son, Ryan, in a stabbing in Doncaster city centre in 2022.
Ryan, who was 20, and his friend Janis Kozlovskis, 17, were killed by Amrit Jhagra in an altercation on January 29, 2022. Jhagra, who was 19 at the time of the attack, was jailed for at least 24 years in prison.
Lisa spoke to The Star at South Yorkshire Police's Knives Take Lives campaign launch, which aims to inform young men of the consequences of carrying and using knives.
Hear from Lisa in this video and from Detective Thomas Ryan, whose experiences investigating five fatal stabbings were the catalyst for the campaign.
Ryan, who was 20, and his friend Janis Kozlovskis, 17, were killed by Amrit Jhagra in an altercation on January 29, 2022. Jhagra, who was 19 at the time of the attack, was jailed for at least 24 years in prison.
Lisa spoke to The Star at South Yorkshire Police's Knives Take Lives campaign launch, which aims to inform young men of the consequences of carrying and using knives.
Hear from Lisa in this video and from Detective Thomas Ryan, whose experiences investigating five fatal stabbings were the catalyst for the campaign.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Three years ago today, my son, along with his friend, was murdered in Doncaster town centre,
00:09just on a night out with his friends. Long time, long place really. Whoever said time's a healer,
00:17it's not. I remember everything, every little detail, from the knock on the door,
00:23to going and ID'ing his body. I live here every day, without fail.
00:39I want to be involved with this campaign, because I don't want it to happen to anybody else's
00:48family. What I go through every day, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, really wouldn't.
00:59Ryan was a lovely lad, he was cheeky, chappy,
01:05he'd do anything for anybody, he was my carer.
01:09I'm Thomas Ryan, I'm a detective from South Yorkshire Police, and I wrote the story that
01:25the animation was based on, and what the comic books were based on. You heard Lisa's story
01:32earlier, and she's the mother of a young guy who died, who was murdered. For me,
01:41to see it once is hard, to see it constantly repeated, it's almost changed the name of the
01:48young man who did the stabbing, who killed the young man. It's just a conveyor belt of people
01:53getting stabbed, young men stabbing other young men. After a few of those, I just thought,
02:01compelled to write a story, to try and just try and stop it. I'm hoping this is a little bit
02:08different, because certainly I haven't seen a campaign before where we're talking to the
02:16murderer. We're talking to the murderer, I'm not telling these young men not to carry knives,
02:23I don't think they'd listen to me if I did. What I want them to be, I want them to be informed,
02:29I just want them to know that if they carry a knife and use it on someone, it will ruin their
02:35life. I want them to just have that awareness that carrying a knife and using it will ruin
02:43their own life, not just that of the person they're attacking. I want kids to feel safe,
02:47I want young people to feel safe on South Yorkshire streets, and we know that isn't the
02:51case right now. Young people seem to think that they need to carry a knife to feel safe, or a
02:56number of young people do, but that is a tiny minority of people in South Yorkshire. The vast
03:01majority of young people in South Yorkshire do not feel that way, do not feel like they need to carry
03:06a knife, and therefore we need to get that message across so that people don't feel as though other
03:11young people are carrying knives, and that simply isn't the case. So that's what we want to do,
03:15is we want to get that message across to young people that you are safe on South Yorkshire
03:18streets, that absolutely you can rely on the police, on your peers, on your colleagues,
03:22on your friends, and absolutely we're going to make sure that message gets across.