Murder #10, Kasey Gordon, Tottenham
Murder #10, Kasey Gordon, Tottenham
Schoolboy Kasey Gordon, 15, was stabbed to death in a busy high street in Tottenham, north London, on January 20, 2011. He was one of four pupils injured by paranoid schizophrenic Serif Aslan on West Green Road. Another 16 year-old boy was stabbed in the chest, a 14 year-old boy suffered a wound to the hip and another 14 year-old received a superficial cut to his face. Kasey, a pupil at the nearby Park View Academy, died despite receiving emergency surgery at the scene.
West Green Road is a long high street and I wasn’t quite sure which stretch of shops Kasey Gordon had been murdered in front of. The murder scene had been cleared quite quickly and there was no visual clues to where it had happened. I asked in a few shops and soon figured out where I needed to go. While asking I soon realised that there seem to be a certain animosity to the kids involved in the incident. Aslan, the man who wielded the knife that killed Gordon was well known and everyone seem to know he was mentally ill. A lot of people told me a lot of the local school kids teased him. They must have found him both strange and harmless. Did the incessant teasing lead Aslan to carry a knife? Who knows but it seem to me that a lot of locals felt that way, specially Asians and Turkish people I talked to. A lot of people came up to me and gave me their thoughts on the murder as I set up my camera on a tripod. Afro Caribbeans felt completely different. Nothing could justify the murder of a schoolboy. It was one of the few times that underlying tensions in the community surfaced in front of me while I photographed a murder site. Only Kasey’s schoolmates seemed united in their feelings for him. The flowers for Kasey Gordon adorned the gates of his school and not the murder site. His friends mourned him not where he died but where he lived his life. As such the place where he died bore no scar.
