After the youth was convicted of manslaughter on Tuesday, victim Bhim Kohli’s daughter, from Leicester, said her father was “brutally and cruelly” taken from the family
A twisted teenager messaged a friend two laughing emojis after learning the man he’d attacked was seriously injured.
Bhim Kohli, 80, later died of his injuries following the humiliating beating in a park. The youth, then 14, kicked and punched the frail pensioner, who was also slapped in the face with a shoe. Both the boy, now 15, and a 13-year-old girl were convicted of manslaughter – but cleared of murder – on Tuesday.
A court heard Mr Kohli called out for help while walking his dog Rocky just yards from his home in Braunstone Town, near Leicester, on the evening of September 1 last year. He had been racially abused, laughed at by the girl, and left on the ground with a broken neck and fractured ribs.
Although the youths fled the scene, the boy boasted about the sickening attack on social media. In reply to a message saying an 80-year-old had been “smacked up” in the park, the boy wrote: “I did that. I watched him pull a knife on a girl and hit her.
“I didn’t mean to batter him. It was one hit and then my anger turned in. I regret it man, I do. I f***ed my life up. Everything is gone. I am sorry bro, I am.”
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Describing a video of the attack during a police interview, the girl said the boy “slapped” Mr Kohli “round the head with his slider”. Asked whether she got any enjoyment out of it, she replied: “Not really but it was a bit funny at the time.”
Family members sobbed at Leicester Crown Court when the pair were found guilty on Tuesday. The teenagers will be sentenced next month when a judge will consider lifting their anonymity but, for now, neither can be named because of their ages.
But the Daily Mail has accessed the boy’s Snapchat, in which he uses the laughing emoji to a friend at least twice in a passage after the attack. The day after the attack, the boy wrote: “Feds know it is me” alongside the laughing face. He also read a BBC News story about the attack.
Susan Kohli, the victim’s daughter, read a statement on the court steps after the verdicts into her father’s killing, and said: “My dad was brutally and cruelly taken away from us when walking our dog Rocky in the park close to our home. He was a devoted life partner to my mum for 55 years. He was a loving dad, grandad, brother and uncle, a retired businessman and a close friend to many, including people who lived in our local community.
“He was an amazing man who loved life. He never took himself seriously, he was good fun to be around and very chatty. He was the person who knitted our family together and we miss him every second of every day. Our home feels so empty without him and will never be the same.
“Every time my mum opens the front door she thinks about what happened to her husband. Listening to the enormity of what happened, what dad was subjected to, will never leave us. We feel angry and disgust towards the teenagers who took dad away from us. They humiliated him, an 80-year-old man, assaulted him, filmed it and laughed at him. Dad did not deserve this and wouldn’t wish this on anyone else.”