Teenager who stabbed Matalan store manager to death given life sentence

A teenage gang member who stabbed the manager of a Matalan store to death during a botched robbery was jailed for a minimum of 20 years today. Kobina Essel, 19, was given a life sentence at the Old Bailey two years after killing 33-year-old Jamie Simpson at the shop in Hackney, east London. Ordering that Essel serve a minimum of 20 years, Judge Martin Stephens told him: "You went into this with your eyes open. You went in with a knife and you did not hesitate to use it." He said the case "demonstrates in a vivid way the horrors of knife crime". Essel – who was also given 11 years concurrent detention for conspiracy to rob – and two accomplices, Anthony Maina, 20, and 17-year-old Randy Osei-Owusu, hid in the store as it closed on Easter Sunday and waited for Simpson to cash up. Essel confronted the manager and stabbed him three times, in the shoulder, back and neck, with a 10in kitchen knife. The latter blow severed Simpson's carotid artery and jugular vein. Colleagues tried to stem the flow of blood with clothes and towels, but he was declared dead by ambulance staff. Maina and Osei-Owusu, as well as the robbery organiser, 25-year-old Simeon Jumah, were convicted of manslaughter last month. Afterwards, it emerged that at the time of the robbery Maina had been on police bail over the fatal stabbing of a teenager during a mobile phone robbery five months earlier. After new evidence came to light, Maina was convicted of the murder of 17-year-old Rizwan Darbar last year and jailed for life with a minimum term of 14 years. Today, he was given indeterminate sentences with minimum terms of six years for manslaughter and five years for the robbery. Osei-Owusu was jailed for nine years for manslaughter and six for the conspiracy. Jumah was sentenced to 14 years for manslaughter and 12 for conspiracy. All the terms run concurrently. Three other men were found guilty of conspiracy to rob the store. Roy Williams, 31, a Matalan security guard and a friend of Simpson, was jailed for 10 years for helping smuggle the robbers inside. The judge told him: "Your involvement was even more despicable because you were in breach of trust." Jammal Chambers, 18, who recruited some of the raid party, was ordered to be detained for seven years, while the getaway driver, 20-year-old Duane Owusu, received an eight-year sentence. Simpson, from Derby, had three daughters and was described by his mother, Lorna, 54, who sat through the trial, as "a caring, loving person". She added: "If you talk to anybody who knows him, they haven't got a bad word to say about him." After the trial, it emerged that, in the 15 months between killing Darbar and being arrested in January last year, Maina was caught with a knife, cannabis, crack cocaine and heroin. Darbar's family said they had no complaints about the police investigation. "The case was extremely difficult from the onset, there was very little forensic evidence, there was very little CCTV evidence," his brother, Tausif, said. "The police did not leave a stone unturned in terms of the investigation."