Standing in the cemetery between her mother’s and brother’s well-tended graves last week, Jade Akoum didn’t care who saw her laughing, then crying, as she delivered news she knew they would both want to hear.
She cleared his brother’s name
She had just won a four-year legal battle to clear her brother Yousef Makki’s name and have it put on public record that the brilliant 17-year-old was ‘unlawfully killed’ by teenager Joshua Molnar in 2019.
Molnar, a public schoolboy, who was also 17 when he stabbed Yousef, had previously been acquitted of murder and manslaughter, having claimed he acted in self-defence – something the family simply did not accept.
After sitting through four days of evidence and legal arguments at a Manchester coroner’s court – including testimony from Molnar himself – Jade couldn’t wait to get to nearby Southern Cemetery where both Yousef and their mother, Debbie, are buried.
Her mum died in the crusade
Debbie died three years ago, after begging her daughter to take up the mantle in the battle for justice for her ‘golden boy’.
‘I used to feel guilty when I visited the cemetery, like I was letting both my brother and mum down, but last week I had a real sense of peace,’ says Jade, a serene but highly focused young woman, who admits the fight took so much out of her she came close to giving up.
‘I turned to Yousef’s grave first and said: ”We’ve done it! We’ve finally proven, publicly, that you didn’t carry a knife or threaten anyone.”
‘Then I turned to where my mum lies and said: ”I kept my promise and didn’t give up, Mum. Everyone now knows what happened.”’
Debbie had campaigned valiantly to this end before her death, aged 55, from sepsis.
She’d spent the previous 14 months struggling to eat or sleep as she mourned her son’s death while battling to prove he was an unarmed ‘peacemaker’ that fateful day.
In the end, she was simply too weak to beat the infection that overwhelmed her.
Yousef was living a promising life
Yousef was one of four siblings raised on a council estate in Manchester by this single mum. His intelligence won him a bursary to £15,000-a-year Manchester Grammar School.
He was a straight-A student, being prepared for the Oxbridge entrance exams and set on studying medicine with ambitions to become a brain surgeon.
The stabbing
Yet this promising life was cut short when he was stabbed through the heart by Molnar after a row between the pair and their mutual friend, 17-year-old Adam Chowdhary, on March 2, 2019, in Hale Barns, an upmarket village on the outskirts of Manchester, where Chowdhary lived.
In a devastating verdict for Yousef’s family, Molnar, a former pupil at £33,000-a-year Ellesmere College, was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter after the jury concluded he acted in self-defence.
Justice prevails
He was handed a 16-month detention and training order after admitting possessing the knife which inflicted the fatal injury, and perverting the course of justice by lying to police at the scene.
Chowdhary, meanwhile – a close friend of Yousef who spent a lot of time at the Makki family home – was acquitted of perverting the course of justice and given a four-month detention order after admitting possession of a flick knife.
‘I spoke to Debbie that day, in July 2019, when the sentences were handed down. What she found hardest to bear was that the verdict implied someone had been forced to defend themselves against her ”gentle giant” son, who had no truck with weapons.
‘Yousef had big dreams – and every ability – to be a brain surgeon and set up free hospitals in the developing world,’ she told me, tearfully.
‘He said he would achieve such amazing things that his name would be all over the newspapers one day.
‘Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine it would happen like this.’
So, understandably, it was the sweetest music to Jade’s ears last week, when coroner Geraint Williams ruled that Yousef was ‘not being violent or threatening’ before he was killed, nor was he holding a blade, adding: ‘I conclude he was not acting in self-defence. What Molnar did amounts to manslaughter.’
