‘I hope he is sorry, but he hasn’t shown any remorse,’ said Caroline Willgoose, Harvey’s brave mum, speaking to the Mirror about her son’s killer Mohammed Umar Khan before he was sentenced
I spoke to Harvey Willgoose’s extraordinary mum as she tried to distract herself from the horrors of the crown court trial by concentrating on a huge jigsaw in a little room next door.
But the distraction wasn’t working, as nothing could make her forget the “cruel and inhumane” murder of her son. Caroline Willgoose, 51, would hug her family as they headed next door to watch the trial, leaving her to find the pieces for the jigsaw.
She told me she could not bear to join them, unable to cope with seeing her son murdered over and over again on CCTV. When she did dare to go in with them and look down on Courtroom One from above, her baby faced killer would stare back up at her, she said.
She was calm as she told me how she’d found out the devastating news her son had died. It was a post on social media saying ‘RIP Harvey’ – put up before police had a chance to get all the family together to break the news.
But instead of being gripped with bitterness and anger, she immediately started using Facebook to save other children instead.
Since that horrendous day in February when she was left screaming “in pain”, she has bravely campaigned for knife arches to be introduced into schools with a petition now being signed by 55,000 people.
But she is not only fighting to stop knife crime she has also been battling to raise the issue of ‘school avoidance.’
She feels she sent her son into the ‘lion’s den’ that day after battling to get him to attend school every day after Covid. The mum is clearly traumatised by the loss of her “amazing” and “beautiful” son Harvey but determined to do good in his name.
Even Harvey’s friends are cared for, as she tries to comfort them when they arrive to sit on Harvey’s bench outside their Sheffield home. And there’s a Harvey’s Hub, a safe place for young people to connect.
In her grief, she even has room for some compassion for her son’s killer, and told me: “He’s very cocky (in court) but is that a mask? Because at the end of the day he’s 15 years old and he’s in this courtroom with all these strangers, these adults. Is it a mask? I hope it is. I hope he is sorry, but he hasn’t shown any remorse.”
When I asked if she thought that his killer understood the magnitude of what he had done, she said: “I don’t know. When I’m in there, he does look at me all the time. And I hope that he does. But, I don’t know.”
“I haven’t got any feelings for him. I feel like he’s been let down as well, really, if you listen to all the story. “
The mum’s fight to save other children is far from over and she told me: “We must stop this happening again. The one place that children should be safe is in school. Once we get knife arches in, then we’ll go into schools and educate children about the devastation of knives. There are no winners here.”
“It is just shocking schools are still living in medieval times. They have not moved on in the modern world, there is no wonder so many kids have anxiety, so many school avoiders, children need to be listened to and schools need to change,” she said.