A man with a prosthetic leg stood alone on a Southampton driveway, tears in his eyes, a bouquet of flowers freshly laid beside a tree. Simon Dorrington had travelled from his home in Eastleigh, a small Hampshire town, to the spot where Henry Nowak died six months earlier. He would have been at the protest himself, but felt physically unable. When he first saw the police body-camera footage of the 18-year-old slumped on the ground, he told me, he felt sick. As we spoke about the killing, he struggled not to cry.
Nowak had been fleeing Vickrum Digwa, who stabbed him repeatedly with a ceremonial Sikh knife after a brief altercation as Nowak walked from a pub to his university accommodation. While Nowak lay dying, Digwa filmed him, told him he had not been injured, then called police claiming he had been assaulted. When officers arrived, they handcuffed and arrested the wounded student as he told them he could not breathe. When he said he had been stabbed, a policeman replied: “I don’t think you have mate.”
“A man with a prosthetic leg weeps at the spot where Henry Nowak died, as anger spreads over police handling of the killing.”
For Dorrington, Nowak’s death shifted his understanding of the police, perhaps irreparably. “I hate them,” he told me. “A couple of officers walked by and I just called them racist.” Before, he had not resented the authorities, but now he feels they are “anti-white”. He had come to pay respects to the dead teenager but also to kick against his nation’s decline. “You let people come in with dinghies but there’s places we can’t go. They get gas, electric, but we’re struggling to pay. Why?”
The failure of the government to protect Nowak seemed to blend with a deeper resentment. Fifteen years earlier, struggling with his mental health, Dorrington jumped from a railway bridge, smashing his leg but failing to die. Driven mad by the pain and unable to convince the NHS to amputate, he took an electric saw to his own ankle last year. After that, the NHS did what he had been asking for.
Anger had grown throughout Digwa’s trial. On Sunday, several days after the 23-year-old was convicted, members of White Vanguard, a neo-Nazi cell that has capitalised on anti-asylum protests across Britain, laid flowers outside Portswood police station, close to the murder scene. Eleven police officers were injured during unrest in Southampton last night, amid protests that saw Nigel Farage’s call for “pure, cold rage” met by Sir Keir Starmer calling it “unforgivable”. Starmer has since hosted the Nowak family at Downing Street. Andy Burnham, touted as the next prime minister, released a statement about “today’s revelations” — referring not to Nowak’s murder but to a Mandelson rigmarole. Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi MP warned: “Beware those cunningly politicising people’s pain.”
But for Dorrington, standing alone with his flowers, the political bubble feels distant. He had come to pay his respects, and to kick against a nation he feels is in decline.