PAUL ERHAHON: Parents and friend share their grief

Paul, 14, of Buttermere Close, Leytonstone, died near his home on Good Friday last year after being attacked by a mob and stabbed in the heart in the foyer of nearby Gean Court, Langthorne Road.

His 15-year-old friend was stabbed five times but recovered from his injuries.

Last month, three boys aged under 16 were found guilty of Paul's murder after a lengthy Old Bailey trial. Two aged 16 were found guilty of manslaughter.

A sixth youth was found guilty of the attempted murder of Paul's friend, but not guilty of the murder or manslaughter of Paul.

The six are believed to have been part of a larger gang of 15.

Family liaison officer DC Matt Day told the Old Bailey today: "I have been asked to say a few words on behalf of Paul's family.

"They are relieved that this trial is over and that the jury have come to the right decision, however they still have a sense of loss and emptiness since Paul's death.

"Paul was a loving son who had a contagious smile and the laugh to go with it.

"Paul's 16th birthday would be on May 28, however his family will no longer be able to celebrate this or any other birthday, nor see him marry or bless the family with children.

"After Paul was stabbed he tried to make it home, where he would be safe, secure and with his family, but Paul knew he was dying and was not going to make it.

"Paul's mother found him lying in a pool of blood in a neighbouring street a few yards from home. His mother gave him first aid, but feeling helpless as his life ebbed away, she cradled him in her arms."

Today, the Old Bailey judge has heard impact statements from both of Paul's parents and his friend.

They are reproduced here in full.

PAUL'S FATHER Paul Aizeyosabo Erhahon Jnr was born on May 28,1992, our first child and only son. His mom called him Aize, his sisters and I called him Junior.

At 14 years and 11 months and 6 days, Junior was over 6 feet tall, handsome and very musically talented.

He loved and was doing very well at school; French and Mathematics were his favourite subjects. He would have been taking his GCSE exams in June.

As much as he loved music and basketball he aspired to be a stockbroker and we often talked about how he was going to achieve this by working hard at school.

I always told him "Son you can be anything you want to be as long as you worked hard at what ever you set your heart to become" but he has not been given that chance.

Junior's smile was contagious and he had a laugh to go with it. To have known Junior was to love him.

April 6, 2007, was the darkest day our family has ever experienced.

People who have been nurtured to live outside the realms of a decent and law abiding society murdered my son. How does one begin to explain the depth of pain they have unleashed on my family and me.

My life ended the day Junior was murdered; all I feel is just a sense of despair and emptiness. I still cannot believe he is gone.

I pray constantly for God and Junior to get me through the day. I cannot fathom a life without him.

When I allow my thoughts to drift into the future all I can see are family gatherings where Junior is not present.

I will never have the chance to show him how to drive. I will never be able to teach him to shave.

There will be school, college, and University graduations that I will never accompany him to, grandchildren I will never get to hold - endless events I looked forward to which will never materialise.

"Aside from the endless agony I feel, other things have crept into my life. Months of missed work where I could not find the will or way to go on. Where once stood a voracious appetite now stands a struggle to give my body the sustenance it needs just to survive.

I have a lack of interest in the things I once so much cherished. Such as reading a good book, watching a movie, the appreciation of colourful flowers blooming and beautiful birds singing, spending time with family and friends - all of these events now seem so meaningless and unfulfilling.

I cannot concentrate and am endlessly lost without notes to myself and other people to remind me of the things I have to do.

I miss my son every waking second of every day. I miss his mischievous smile and the son and fatherly things we did. His dancing, going to the park to play basketball, sitting round the dining table discussing his day with his sisters, helping him with his homework or him helping his siblings. Junior playing rough and tumble with his sisters.

The pain of Junior's murder is unlike anything I have ever experienced and unlike anything I could have ever imagined.

I feel as though the guilty boys have ripped out my heart with their bare hands and torn it very slowly into pieces.

Witnessing the pain that our families and friends are also suffering only adds to my own.

The ripples of devastation they have caused continue to affect not just us, but also Junior's friends and the residents of Buttermere Close and its environs, where we used to live. His loss is an open wound that will never heal. I will never get over it.

The attack they carried out on Junior was cowardly and barbaric, they showed him no mercy and have shown absolutely no remorse since.

They have made the experience even more agonising by refusing to face up and to admit to their crime and by dragging me, our families and friends through a full trial.

Junior did his best to make it home that night and he nearly made it.

Cradling him in his final moments in our arms, he passed on, as his mom and I desperately try to resuscitate him.

It comforts me to know that as he passed on from this world he was absolutely safe and secure in the knowledge that we were there and it just would not be possible for me to love him any more than I do and will for ever.

No sentence can be enough for us. They were in total command of what they did that day; they killed our son in cold blood.

We do not seek or ask for vengeance as that is left for God. The pain and hurt that we as a family carry will be with us for life. It is a sentence that has no remission.

The love of family and friends surrounds us, and God has worked through them. A friend has given me a book of writings for people who have suffered loss.

Among them was the saying: "All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle". Those words helped us. We know Junior is in heaven until we join him.

God bless you all.

PAUL'S MOTHER, RITA My son Paul 'Aize' Erhahon Jnr. On April 6, 2007, life as I knew it was changed forever. I lost one of the most precious things in my world to me, my son Aize.

I cannot recall life before being a mother. It most often seems that my own life began on May 28,1992, on the day that he was born...and that it changed forever on April 6, 2007.

When these people murdered my son, they robbed us of not only our son, but of our family life.

Aize deserved the right to live his life. To grow up into a handsome man, to love, to succeed, to fail; and to get back up again just like all the rest of us, to marry and bless me with grandchildren.

It makes no sense to me that these boys thought that they could go out and kill an innocent boy without any provocation whatsoever.

I had the right to watch my son grow up. To see him mature and realise his potential. His sisters had the rights to share secrets with him, tease him and ask him for advice and guidance.

His uncles and aunties had the right to have him at Christmas dinners, birthdays and family gathering and his grandparents had the right to see themselves in him.

Aize was a loving, caring and giving young boy with a heart as big as the world. To know Aize was to love him, he was a friend to everyone he met.

He was sensitive and compassionate to other people, and very intelligent also. He taught me fractions (maths) and always assisted his sisters with their homework. I miss that a lot.

Because of these boys, none of us will get to do those things. Instead, we've each been given a lifetime sentence of loss and sadness.

Each of us in our own way will learn to live with those emotions, of course. But I don't think anything will ever completely take them away.

My son fell and died opposite where I worked and near to our home.

This made going back to the area and continuing to live there torturous and impossible. I have had to leave my home of eight years and try to start a new life all over again.

We are a Christian family, and the Easter period is very important to us, it symbolizes the time our Lord Jesus Christ died, was buried and rose from the dead, and it's a time where Christians all over the world remember the importance of the blood of Jesus.

Aize was murdered on Good Friday. Because of his death, we can never celebrate that occasion again in our lives.

Our wedding anniversary is also on April 22, and because of his death in April, we can never find joy in the month that meant so much for us.

Words seem trite when describing what follows when my only son is murdered - stripped from my life. I can, however, give you some idea of what I went through: It's about looking out my bedroom window and seeing one of Aize's friends looking over his shoulder and knocking at my door to say that Aize has been attacked by the these people and is lying on the ground at the junction of my house.

It's about running over to see him lying down and covered in a pool of blood. I have never seen so much blood in my entire life.

It's about calling for someone to help me and praying to God to save his life.

It's about breathing into his mouth and hearing the guzzling noise of blood in his stomach. Till today, I can never get that noise out of my head.

It's about seeing a single tear roll out of his right eye and feeling helpless, not knowing if he was in pain or not.

It's about covering him with a blanket because he was getting cold and I wanted to keep him warm.

It's about watching my son die right in front of my very own eyes.

It's about watching the ambulance come and take him away from me, and telling me to meet them at the hospital.

It's about arriving at the hospital and waiting and praying that God will keep him alive.

It's about seeing the surgeon coming out of the room and telling me that he was sorry.

It's about the denial and screaming at him and asking him to get back in there and wake my son up for me to take him home.

It's about asking them to bring my son out for me to see him and truly believe that he was really dead.

It's about going home and telling my daughters that their brother was dead.

It's about having to have a closed casket service.

It's about seeing so many sad people, knowing that they too are mourning our son's loss.

It's about a church service where over 700 people attended, young and old, black and white, rich and poor.

It's about a priest, who was stunned by the amount of people mourning the loss of a 14 year old young boy, my son Aize, and reminding us all that Aize's death was not God's will, but an act of violence.

It's about his birthday coming just five weeks later and he's not there. He would have been 15 years old. He was really looking forward to it and planned on going to the cinema with his friends.

It's about our first Christmas and first birthdays without Aize, and the sense of hopelessness and sadness.

On Mother's Day last year my son bought me a box of my favourite chocolates and a DVD film. This year he was not there. He was not able to shower me with gifts that a mother would cherish. I will no longer be able to hear "I love you so much mommy", and his heart warming hugs.

But there is one thing for sure, and that is I will be with him again some day. I now have a very special guardian angel and believe that through him I will be able to live again.

Our home and neighbourhood, a place of refuge from the world that we have lived in for almost eight years has been invaded by violence and evil.

These people need to take full responsibility for what they have done; they acted as a group to kill an innocent boy.

In 2007 26 teenagers were killed due to knife and gun crimes. I have always prayed that my children were not going to become a statistics, but these people made my son one.

I watch television and listen to the news every time and see my son's picture or name flagged up and numbered as one of the teenagers killed in 2007 and it is a nightmare that never goes away.

These people showed no mercy to my son, whom I had only just waved goodbye to 20 minutes before he was attacked. They gathered around him and started beating him up.

They showed no mercy, he was running home to his family, and they just fled from the scene and went to the park after their attacks on my son and his friend that they left for dead. Our family will forever be tormented by visions of what happened to our loved one, our son, brother and grandson. He was just an innocent boy caught in the wrong place and time.

PAUL'S FRIEND, WOUNDED IN THE ATTACK I first met Paul Erhahon in 2000, when my family had just moved to the Leytonstone area. I saw Paul in the street, he said hello to me and asked where I lived. I told him and we soon realised that we were more or less neighbours.

We hit it off straight away, he made me laugh, he was funny, we had the kind of friendship where we understood each other's thoughts, without actually having to say anything to each other!

I liked everything about him. We soon became the best of friends and my family got to know him and were very fond of him, especially my brothers and sister.

If Paul came to visit me at home and for example I was upstairs, he would always take time out to speak to my family first.

He would often help my Mum and Dad and I remember he helped my mum with the shopping, he didn't have to but did without being asked.

I would see Paul every day after school, almost without fail and I soon became close to his family.

I would like to try and say how this terrible incident had affected me, I find this difficult to put into words but I can say the following.

I first realised Paul was seriously injured that day when I got out of my brother's car on the way to the hospital and saw Paul lying on the floor.

He was motionless, it was obvious something was seriously wrong but it was not until later when I was in hospital before I had my operation that I asked one of the nurses if he was alive - she told me that he wasn't.

I understood the concept of him physically being dead but I could not really believe it. It was not as if he had been ill, this was all so unexpected, so quick, it happened all to quickly. Literally one minute he was there, the next he was gone.

I have great difficulty in understanding why I am still alive and Paul isn't - I think about that a lot, I don't think I will ever understand why this had to happen, I just try and cope with it.

I really miss Paul, he was a huge part of my life and I think about what happened almost every day - I think I always will.

I find it difficult seeing Paul's parents as I am still here and he is not, but I imagine its probably more difficult for them seeing me.

This incident has also affected my family. We have had to move house twice and now live in an area that we really do not wish to be in. we were fine and happy living where we were.

It has affected my siblings, they now have longer journeys to work and college. My Mum and Dad have fully supported me through this incident and also during the trial.

As for how this has affected me, I remember feeling a lot of physical pain after the attack, literally all over me and at one point as I was making my way home, I saw the blood I lost and believed I was going to die, I was so scared.

I had to sit my GCSE exams in the weeks that followed the attack, it was impossible for me to apply myself and I failed them.

This now means I am attending college to try and catch up, but I am not finding this easy.

I have also lost my self-confidence, I tend not to go out on my own in case I am attacked further, I like to have someone with me.

I also have dreams and nightmares about the attack, they used to be nightly but I now have them about twice a week. I am still experiencing pain in my leg and chest because of the attack and my treatment is still ongoing.

I tend to think of Paul more than myself when I think about the attack - I miss him terribly. I actually used to consider one of the defendants to be a friend of mine as we played football and went to school together.

I cannot express how angry I am about what happened, my friend died for no good reason, but I can say that I consider myself privileged to have known Paul.

This attack has changed my life for good, I will always have the physical and psychological scars of what happened that day.