Mother of knife victim Shaquan Sammy-Plummer: killer took my boy’s life for nothing

Reunion: Jessica Plummer with trauma surgeon Tom Konig and paramedic Shaun Rock, far left, at the Royal London’s helipad
Vicki Couchman
Ross Lydall @RossLydall20 September 2016

The mother of a boy stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack today called on teenagers to “put down the knife” and spare other parents the same horrors.

Jessica Plummer, 46, said she had been destroyed by the murder of her son Shaquan, 17, who was killed as he attempted to leave a house party.

She spoke as she was reunited with the doctor from London’s Air Ambulance who performed open-heart surgery on her son.

Ms Plummer, who has since set up the Shaquan Sammy-Plummer Foundation, said: “What I want to do is try to save a life by encouraging children to put down the knife. Don’t put your parents through the same as me.”

In January last year, as Shaquan tried to leave a party in Winchmore Hill, he was hunted down and stabbed in the chest by host Jemal Williams, 20, “to teach him a lesson”.

Victim: Shaquan Sammy-Plummer

Williams had demanded Shaquan, a “smart, ambitious” pupil at La Swap sixth-form college in Camden, hand over a bag of snacks before he left.

After the stabbing, an ambulance taking Shaquan to the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel was intercepted by an air ambulance fast-response car.

Surgeon Tom Konig, aided by paramedics Shaun Rock and David Gordedo, opened the boy’s chest and held his heart as they tried to bring him back to life.

Ms Plummer has since given £1,000 to the air ambulance and pledged half of all proceeds from her charity. She plans to work with the St Giles’s Trust and Barts Health NHS Trust to turn teenagers away from knife crime.

She said Shaquan, her second child, would have been starting his second year at university today. Her other children, Andre, 17, and Shantel, 21, are struggling to deal with his death.

“I’m still waiting for my son to walk through the door,” she said. “I’m expecting him to come every day. I would give anything to have him back. Every day I will open the door and go outside and look for him.”

She cannot leave home without a badge bearing his photograph. “It’s like he is with me all the time,” she said. “I feel naked without it.”

Williams, a habitual carrier of knives, was sentenced in April at the Old Bailey to a minimum of 24 years.

The judge said he had “shown not a shred of remorse” and the police said Shaquan’s death was a “meaningless tragedy”. Ms Plummer said of the killer: “I’m not blaming anyone, but he has to face responsibility for what he did. He took my son’s life for no reason. He is still living life. All I have is a cemetery.”

Police investigating the murder faced a wall of silence. Ms Plummer, of Finsbury Park, told parents: “You need not cover for your children. If they are doing wrong, you need to speak out.”

Mr Konig, a trauma surgeon based at the Royal London, said 30 per cent of its cases involved knife crime. “You get a call in the middle of the night, you come in and you sort it out,” he said. “You have just got to keep going.” He told Ms Plummer: “Sadly you are not the first and you will not be the last.”

Mr Rock, a specialist paramedic at London Ambulance Service, said air ambulance medics were “literally doing open-heart surgery in the street”.

He added: “It’s almost like battlefield medicine. I was the incident officer at the Damilola Taylor stabbing in Peckham [in 2000]. I thought, ‘That has got to be the first and last’, but the city is destroying its potential with the loss of these young men.”

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