How schoolboy’s final hours unfolded | UK News

When Harvey Willgoose left for school on 3 February, neither he, nor those who knew and loved him, had any idea he would not return home again.

This is the story of Harvey’s final hours, as told to the and the jury, who have convicted his 15-year-old schoolmate of murder.

“I followed him to the door, and he said, ‘shut the door behind me – I love you’,” Caroline Willgoose recalls.

Those eight words were the final ones Harvey would speak to his mum.

Earlier in the morning, as he got ready to go to All Saints Catholic High School in Sheffield, he had asked his mum if she was proud of him.

“I am, love,” came the reply.

For about a year, Harvey had regularly missed school. There were a number of reasons, including anxiety, but more recently a concern about weapons at the site.

The week before his murder, there had been a lockdown at the 1,400-pupil school following a fight between a friend of Harvey’s and a friend of his soon-to-be killer.

The defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had insisted Harvey’s friend had a knife on him, but police never found one.

Harvey had not been in school that day.

Two days later, on the Friday before he was killed, Harvey had messaged his dad: “Am not going in that school while people have knives.”

The following week, he summoned the courage to return – and was fatally stabbed in the chest by another pupil.

During a month-long trial at Sheffield Crown Court, his killer admitted manslaughter, but denied murder, arguing he had suffered a “loss of control” – saying his memory of what happened stopped “just before I stabbed him”.

However, the jury subsequently found him guilty of murder.

On Monday 3 February, as pupils across Sheffield prepared for a normal school day, Harvey’s killer searched online for a prayer to keep him safe and tucked a hunting knife into his coat pocket.

He described it as a “scary knife” which he only kept for protection: “If someone tried to attack me and I pulled it out, they’re not going to want to fight me,” he later told the jury.

Harvey and the defendant were in separate social groups at school, but were generally on good terms – at least until a “non-stop” argument had erupted on Snapchat the weekend after the fight between their friends.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Harvey – whose mum said “loved his friends like he loved his family” – posted his address on the chat.

He tagged the defendant’s friend, and said: “If you’ve got a problem with [my friends] – any of them – you’ve got my addy [address], I’ll deal with it, simple.”

Before school on Monday, Harvey opened Snapchat again to try and clear the air.

This time, he messaged the defendant directly, asking if there was “beef” – or tension – between them. The defendant responded, “nah but if u wan beef we can hav it”.

Then, in an otherwise typical teenage, slang-filled, message, his tone changed, telling Harvey he had been his first friend at the school.

At about 09:15 that morning, Harvey passed the teenager, who was sitting at a desk in an empty school corridor. Harvey pointed at him and called him a name in fun, the defendant said.

Harvey then had asked what had happened to his injured hand, and joked about his poor boxing skills.

The teenager pushed Harvey a few times, and they appeared to be sparring. It was light-hearted, he said, and they parted with a handshake.

He told the jury: “I was thinking it was all right between me and him.”

Then, in a foreshadowing of the police statement he would make the following day, the boy went back to the account he had been asked to write about the previous week’s fight.

He had been physically restrained from getting involved in the altercation, but, unlike the other boys involved, he had not been suspended.

Soon after, Harvey ran into teacher Claire Staniforth, who was head of Year 10 at the time. He asked if she was pleased to see him, and she said yes.

“He said he hadn’t been planning to [attend], because he heard there had been a knife. I said I wouldn’t have been in work if someone had a knife,” Ms Staniforth told the jury.

Harvey, in a mock show of toughness held his hands up and added: “As if anyone’s going to stab me.”

At about 10:55, in morning break, he and the defendant met in the same corridor as before.

Now much busier, they pushed into each other again, but the boy later claimed to the court Harvey had threatened to “juck” – or stab – him.

The defendant did not mention this skirmish to Ms Staniforth when, 15 minutes later, he went to her office to ask to be excused from his science lesson in order to avoid two other students.

He had already been allowed to miss PE earlier – to avoid the boy he claimed had brought the knife the week before – so was told to attend science as normal.

Harvey arrived to the lesson late, but in a “good mood”, said teacher Sophie Heath-Whyte.

“We had a bit of a joke,” she told the jury. “My arm was in a sling at the time [and] he was joking, saying I had been in a fight.”

But when the defendant walked in, Harvey asked for a time-out. As the boys crossed paths in the narrow gap between desks, they “squared up”.

The teacher said they were baiting each other, with the defendant admitting he taunted Harvey in an effort to get him to lose his cool.

“If he hits me first, I’ve got a reason to hit him back,” he said in court.

He would later insist he had not wanted to hit Harvey, and had “worded it out wrong”.

The jury heard the defendant had been physically and emotionally abused at home, and had a long history of being bullied. There were reports of him being malnourished.

“I remember feeling sorry for him,” said Ms Heath-Whyte said, recalling he had seemed quiet and sad after the tussle with Harvey.

He stayed in the lesson, keeping his coat on despite being asked to remove it – the knife still in his pocket.

Harvey visited Ms Staniforth briefly, complaining that the boy had pushed him, then went to the isolation room for some quiet time.

At 12:05, five minutes before lunch, Harvey spoke to Ms Staniforth again via the phone in the isolation room.

“Hi bestie,” he said. The teacher asked if he was getting any food, and said he could spend his lunch break in her office. However, “he never arrived”.

The teacher told the court that she and Harvey would make each other laugh. He was a boy who could sometimes be cheeky but “would never overstep boundaries”.

At the start of the lunch break, Harvey told one pupil the defendant had motioned taking something from his pocket in science class. Harvey had thought he was bluffing.

Meanwhile, the defendant was speaking to one of his friends about Harvey.

“He suddenly just talked about a knife,” the friend told police.

“I told him, ‘give it to me before you do something stupid’, but he didn’t listen.”

At 12:15, in the school courtyard, Harvey was said to have met the defendant for the final time.

The defendant claimed Harvey had threatened him before placing his hand on his arm.

The jury was told that, thinking he was about to be stabbed, the boy pulled the 13cm-long black blade from his pocket.

At that point, he claimed, his memory failed.

CCTV footage played in court showed him pass the knife to his right hand and stab Harvey in the heart with such force he severed one of his ribs.

For 49 seconds, Harvey stayed on his feet. Fatally injured, he then backed away across the courtyard, in shock, before moving back towards his attacker.

The knife-wielding teen advanced, shouting “come on! What now?” according to witnesses, and Harvey moved away.

One girl, standing just feet away, told the jury she grabbed a younger girl and ran, saying, “he’s got a knife, he’s just stabbed somebody!”.

Harvey leant into the nearby cafeteria, looked at his attacker for a final time, then stepped back into the courtyard, looked down at his chest and collapsed to the floor.

For a moment, he lay alone.

Ms Staniforth heard shouting and ran towards the courtyard: “I told him I was there,” she told the jury, through tears.

Morgan Davis, assistant head, told the court he saw people huddled around Harvey as he headed towards the cafeteria – and the culprit.

“I said, ‘just give me the knife’.”

Mr Davis told the court the defendant looked scared and in shock: “He just kept repeating, ‘you know I can’t control it’.”

He did not resist the teacher as he took the knife from him, the court heard.

The ambulance was called at 12:17 GMT. For seven long minutes, a teacher tried to help Harvey before paramedics arrived.

Meanwhile, head teacher Sean Pender escorted the defendant to his office.

Mr Pender testified that the attacker said he had stabbed Harvey “once or twice”, and added: “I’m not right in the head. My mum doesn’t look after me right. I’ve stabbed him.”

At trial, the boy claimed he did not remember the stabbing, describing himself as lost “in the moment”.

He was arrested in the head teacher’s office.

Meanwhile, police arrived at Harvey’s home and took his mum to Sheffield Children’s Hospital.

Mrs Willgoose told the how on the way there, a voice on the officer’s walkie talkie said: “Turn the blue lights off, go at normal speed.”

“We got there, and someone had put ‘RIP Harvey’ [online],” she said.

“We were told he had passed away. I just started screaming.”

Harvey was pronounced dead at 13:24.

Mrs Willgoose and some of Harvey’s pals told the how friends and family were key to him.

One teenager, who had known Harvey since they were six, said he thought about him on a daily basis: “Every time I needed somewhere to go or someone to see, even at half three in morning, he would always be there no matter what.”

“He weren’t a friend, he was more family,” he added.

Harvey’s mum spoke about how her son brought life to their home: “The house was always really busy, his friends were always there.

“He liked to be at home so our house was always full of kids. Now it’s quiet…”

She said her son’s killer had “ruined his life, and Harvey hasn’t got a life anymore,” adding there were now two families “with an empty bedroom”.

“There are no winners here.”