A 15 year old boy has been sentenced to life with a minimum of 17 years for luring his 12 year old friend into woodland, and then stabbing him more than 70 times.
Marcel Grzeszcz launched the brutal and prolonged attack on 12-year-old Robert Buncis after the pair supposedly fell out over drugs worth £50.
The pathologist who examined the victim's body said he had 22 different sites of injury across his body, and – on top of injuries suggesting Grzeszcz had tried to dismember Buncis – there was also evidence he tried to decapitate him.
Marcel Grzeszcz is, needless to say, a troubled teen.
Marcel Grzeszcz has been jailed for a minimum of 16 years and 36 days for murdering his 12-year-old friend.
Lincolnshire Police
He was kicked out of primary school for carrying a knife and then excluded from secondary school for drug dealing. Just days before the murder, he had carried out a street attack and was apparently intending to set himself up as a cannabis dealer.
It's not clear yet if social services were ever called upon.
Now, it's obviously horrific that anyone can be capable of this unspeakable depravity – the fact he was only 14 at the time makes this harrowing crime even more shocking. But let's be clear - Grzeszcz WILL one day be out of prison and back on the streets. And I'm worried about what happens when he is.
Our justice system is ineffective.
More and more children are committing bodily harm - with offences of this kind having gone up 11% in the last 10 years. Knife crimes committed by children have also been on an upwards trajectory for the last 6 years.
So yes, there is absolutely a problem with children committing violence.
But the real question is – if we accept that child killers will eventually emerge from prison still young and free to live out their lives in full, can we be sure they are transformed into people we actually want in society?
I suspect the answer is no.
And this is for a number of reasons.
Firstly, reoffending rates for children has remained steady over the last 10 years; and the frequency of reoffending for those who do has actually GONE UP.
Just a few weeks ago, the Parliamentary Justice Committee found mental health support in prisons to be inadequate, with psychiatric issues going untreated on a persistent basis.
Prisons are also notoriously rife with gang and drug activity, exactly the sort of environment that would drive a young man with an already disturbed mind further into the abyss.
And, as for rehabilitation - that isn't working either. The latest annual report into the probation service by Her Majesty's Inspectorate reveals damning findings. It finds that probation officials consistently show a 'lack of professional curiosity, incorrect classification of risk, poor information-sharing with prisons and police, over-optimistic assessments of the progress of offenders' and that 'restrictions on offenders are often prematurely relaxed'.
This dangerous cocktail of failures means that as it stands, we as the public, can never be sure that young bloodthirsty killers like Grzeszcz are reformed.
