Southampton Times@sotontimes
🔺Transcripts form Henry Nowak Case raise more questions:
Five residents of Belmont Road, where the stabbing took place, gave evidence in Digwa’s trial at Southampton crown court.
Andrew Mortimore and his wife Fiona had lived on the street for years. That night, the pair were reading in bed at about 11.15pm. Ten minutes later they heard shouting and male voices “arguing loudly”.
The commotion prompted Andrew to get out of bed and look out of the window. He told the court: “During the time I was observing these people outside the block of flats, I think I heard a male voice say, ‘I’m not racist.’ I couldn’t hear anything else that was being said. These are the only actual words I think I heard.”
Nicholas Lobbenberg KC, who prosecuted Digwa, told the jury that “even as Henry is dying” he said: “I’m not a racist … That was heard by Andrew Mortimore, one of the witnesses that was read to you, and as he lay dying, Henry denied that he was the attacker.”
Neighbours gave differing accounts of how many people were at the scene after the stabbing. Baldock recalled seeing “four to six” men who were all wearing puffer jackets gathered on the street, while other witnesses only recalled seeing Digwa and his three relatives. His brother and parents were captured on police bodycam footage at the scene.
“After about two or three minutes I went to the window as it was getting worse and the tone was getting scary,” Baldock told the court in his written statement. “I felt scared. The tone gave me a pit in my stomach. It was really, really aggressive like a carnal, animalistic tone.”
He later heard someone shout, “this white guy racially attacked us” and “you’re not getting away, big man. They also shouted, ‘I’m going to slash you,’ or ‘I am going to smash you.’”
Baldock then heard a man he suspected was the victim say, “I am going to die. I am going to die,” before someone said back to him: “You’re not going to die, you’re fine.”
Several of the men in puffer jackets had started leaving the scene in the direction of St Denys Road, where the Digwa family lived at the time, before police arrived. According to Baldock, “they walked off rather than ran”. His account suggests there could have been more people on the scene than originally thought.
His housemate, Annabel Davis, told the court that three of the men present “didn’t seem to be helping” Nowak as his body lay on the ground.
After the police had arrived, another witness, Angus Kemp, went outside to give officers his contact details. Here, he was approached by a middle-aged man and a woman — who appeared to be Digwa’s parents, based on his descriptions — who asked Kemp whether he saw what took place. Kemp also saw Digwa’s mother try to stop a police officer from arresting her son.
“I saw the middle-aged woman very distressed and going towards this male and a female officer trying to stop her, and saying that she can’t and discouraging her from going towards the young male,” Kemp said.
Minutes later officers said they couldn’t find a pulse. Digwa was arrested at the scene on suspicion of attempted murder.
Read the Times article here
thetimes.com/uk/crime/artic…
