TWO teenagers have been sentenced to life for the murder of a schoolboy in a case of mistaken identity.
Ronan Kanda, 16, was walking back home in Wolverhampton after buying a £5 PlayStation controller on June 29 last year when he was fatally stabbed.
He had a headphone on when Prabjeet Veadhesa and Sukhman Shergill attacked him just two doors away from his home, mistaking him for another boy who owed money to Shergill.
Veadhesa thrust a knife 20 cm deep into Kand’s back and hip area and inflicted another wound – 17 cm deep – in his chest, while Shergill, brandished another weapon at the scene.
The masked attackers, who were friends with Kanda and went to school with him at The Khalsa Academy Wolverhampton, fled the place after the attack, while the victim collapsed in the street.
Emergency services were called but Kanda was pronounced dead at the scene.
The attackers, both aged 16 at the time of the murder, were convicted in May this year after a five-week trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court.
Shergill’s lawyer sought a lenient treatment for his client, saying Veadhesa, from Walsall, “was the one who actually killed Ronan” but the court said they acted in joint enterprise.
On Thursday (13), Veadhesa was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in jail and Shergill, from Willenhall, was jailed for at least 16 years.
Pronouncing the judgment, Justice Choudhury said the devastation caused by the pair’s “cowardly act” of running up behind the victim and stabbing him twice was “hard to comprehend”.
The loss of life was “almost too great to bear” for Kanda’s family, he said during the sentencing hearing.
CPS West Midlands’ senior crown prosecutor Samantha Dixon previously described Kanda as “an intelligent, popular boy” whose life was taken by the actions of the “violent young men”.
There was nothing to suggest Kanda was the intended victim and he was “caught in the wrong place at the wrong time”, Dixon said after the conviction of the duo, both aged 17 now.
They “wrongly believed they could administer their own twisted brand of justice and get away with it”, the senior prosecutor said.
