The call came just past 8:30 in the evening. A 16-year-old boy was lying bleeding in the street, and two terrified passersby were on the phone with the ambulance service, doing their best to give first aid while describing what they could see. It was clear this was serious. The victim was critically injured.
Rapid response doctors performed surgery right where Ronan fell, but the wounds were too catastrophic. He was declared dead at 21:09. Pooja was at her meditation class when her neighbor, who was there too, got a call. “Pooja, there’s been a stabbing outside our house.
” She rang her husband. “What’s going on? Where is Ronan? ” He looked out the window and said something was happening, loads of people, police outside.
Then he went out to see. A moment later, he called back. “They’re saying it’s an Indian boy. They think it’s Ronan.
”
Pooja raced to the scene. The police had taped off the whole area, and they wouldn’t let her through. She pushed. She screamed.
They wouldn’t let her in. Then the ambulance crew came forward and told her they had tried to operate on her son, tried to save his life, and they couldn’t. “No,” she said. “You cannot tell me my son has been stabbed and died.
”
Detectives arrived to find a murder scene in a quiet residential street in broad daylight. Witnesses included a 15-year-old girl who saw two people stab Ronan and run away. Another neighbor saw them flee too. The investigators immediately began door-to-door work, knowing that home surveillance cameras along the road might hold the key.
Nikki, Ronan’s sister, was in Greece celebrating the end of her university finals with friends. Around half nine or ten at night, she got a Snapchat from a friend: “Hey, Nikki. I know you’re in Greece, but there’s a blue tent outside your house. Looks like somebody’s been murdered.
” She called her mom. No answer. She called her dad. He said, “The boy is gone.
Ronan’s died. ”
She flew home. She had convinced herself she would see Ronan at the airport, that the whole thing was some sick joke. When her aunt met her instead, she broke down.
Driving home, she saw the police tapes, her brother’s blood still on the road, her mother on the floor crying. She said she still sits there mentally. “Within that second, my son was just taken from me,” Pooja said. Ronan was the life of the family.
He and Nikki were five years apart but shared everything, especially their love of Liverpool FC. He was the funniest person she knew, with a dry sense of humor, the one who would say exactly what everyone was thinking at a family gathering. If someone asked him for help, he would make sure he could do it one hundred percent. His school friends described him as popular, bubbly, energetic.
“You couldn’t find anyone in our year group who would say a bad thing about him,” one friend said. His tutor called him modest, friendly, intelligent—a smashing kid. The police quickly learned Ronan had no contact with police and was not gang-involved, which ruled out that motive. Footage showed him smiling and greeting friends at a snooker club earlier that evening.
Around 8:00, he walked to a friend’s house to buy a PlayStation controller. Cameras then picked him up walking back home along Mount Road, in his own world, probably listening to music, doing something completely innocent. But the surveillance footage showed something suspicious: a small red car circling the area. It drove down side roads, came back onto the main road, then returned to Mount Road, turning around and heading back in the direction Ronan had just walked.
The car parked in a side street. Two men got out and ran toward Ronan. Both brandished weapons. Ronan had no idea anyone was behind him.
He was stabbed first on his right side, then in the chest. He staggered up the road, collapsed, and died. The weapon used was enormous. “They are like swords, not knives,” one detective said.
The attackers wore hoods and face masks, trying to hide their identities. But video forensics enhanced the footage. One attacker wore a jacket with a distinct logo on the left pocket, green pants, and a green hooded sweatshirt under his black jacket. The lead attacker appeared to wear only one glove, meaning he likely left fingerprints on the murder weapon if it was ever found.
Ronan’s autopsy confirmed the horror. Dr. Randall identified two stab wounds. One penetrated the right side of his abdomen, going in 20 centimeters.
The second penetrated his heart to a depth of 17 centimeters. “It literally went through his heart and almost came out the other side,” the doctor said. The following day, flowers lined the street. Liverpool tops, hoodies, candles.
The whole community showed its love. “It shows how much Ronan was loved,” Nikki said. “He was the least deserving of anything violent happening to him,” a friend said. “Nobody on earth deserves that, let alone somebody so pure and innocent.
”
Police sifted through thousands of hours of CCTV. Finally, they captured the moment the attackers got back into the red car and identified its license plate. That number led to the registered keeper’s address. Detectives arrested the driver and another young man who had been in the front seat.
Both refused to talk. But the investigation was about to take an unexpected turn. A 16-year-old named Sukhman Shergill walked into Bloxwich Police Station with his uncle. He told staff he had been present when Ronan was murdered the night before.
Detectives knew immediately he was lying. CCTV showed only two people at the murder, and both were carrying weapons. If Sukhman was there, he had to be the second attacker. He was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Sukhman initially claimed the whole thing was about a kid from school who owed him money. He said he and a friend went to find that kid, that he had paused when he realized the person they approached was not the one who owed him money, but that the other suspect had stabbed Ronan anyway. He refused to name the other suspect. Police turned to Sukhman’s school friends.
One recalled that the day after the murder, the friend group sat together trying to work out who could have done it. “What made us notice was who didn’t turn up for the school trip. The two people that were missing were Sukhman and Prabhjeet. Sukhman, no one really expected.
But Prabhjeet, you thought, yeah, that’s a possibility. ”
Prabhjeet Virdee was not the most well-behaved kid. He had been expelled from school just before his GCSEs after a fight. Phone records linked him to Sukhman on the night of the murder.
Location data placed his phone at the scene. He was arrested on suspicion of murder. A search of his home did not turn up the murder weapon or clothing, but in the bin, officers found packaging for a ninja sword set. They tracked down the post office where the package was collected.
Footage showed Prabhjeet leaving his house empty-handed and returning with a parcel. The weapons inside were bought online. He was under 18, so he used false identification to make the purchase. Investigators noted Prabhjeet seemed obsessed with knives—he had an entire collection—and had a history of getting into fights.
Footage from a neighbor’s camera showed Sukhman arriving at Prabhjeet’s house at about 6:34 p. m. , wearing a long quilted jacket, a face mask, and his hood up. They left together at 19:29, Prabhjeet keeping his head down, clearly trying to avoid the camera.
They were wearing the same clothes as the men who attacked Ronan. Prabhjeet initially gave a no-comment interview. But when he learned the murder had been caught on camera and that Sukhman was already in custody, he decided to talk. He admitted he was the one who stabbed Ronan.
He claimed he and Sukhman had gone to enforce a debt owed to Sukhman, and that Ronan was not the intended target. Their intention, he said, was only to threaten or scare the person to get the money back. Detectives were blunt about what that meant. “This was a true case of mistaken identity.
Ronan was not killed because he was a target. He wasn’t killed because he’d been in dispute with either of the two suspects. He was killed because they mistook him for somebody else. ”
When police called to say they had charged Prabhjeet Virdee and Sukhman Shergill, Pooja, her husband, and Nikki just looked at each other.
“Who the hell are these people? ” The whole thing was so confusing. Nearly ten months after the murder, four young men went on trial. Prabhjeet and Sukhman were the two who got out of the car.
The driver and passenger in the red getaway car were charged with assisting. All four pleaded not guilty to murder. The defense for the two in the car claimed they had no idea what was going to happen. Prabhjeet and Sukhman both claimed they only intended to scare the young man they chased up the street.
The prosecution opened by showing the jury the CCTV. “Everybody looked horrified,” one person present said. “You are literally seeing a child’s death in front of you with a sword, and that child screaming for help. That is horrific.
”
The murder weapon was a ninja sword, the blade at least a foot long and razor sharp. Police obtained an identical weapon as evidence. Audio enhancement of the footage confirmed the attackers approached Ronan in total silence. No yelling, no dialogue, no warning.
They simply ran up and stabbed him. The trial lasted five weeks. After two and a half hours of deliberation, the jury returned guilty verdicts for murder against both Prabhjeet Virdee and Sukhman Shergill. The driver and passenger were found not guilty.
Prabhjeet was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 18 years. Sukhman, being a juvenile, received life with a minimum term of 16 years. When the verdict was read, Pooja’s husband screamed in the courtroom. “Yes.
You took our child. You deserve to be in that jail forever. Never forgive them for taking my child’s life. The impact is forever.
”
The family was torn apart. But in the horrific aftermath, they decided to fight for something positive. Pooja began campaigning against the sale of ninja swords. “I just knew I had to do something.
Otherwise, I failed Ronan,” she said. “These weapons are lethal. They have no purpose in our society. ”
Her campaign reached Parliament.
In November 2024, the government announced what became known as Ronan’s Law, broadening the ban on weapons and adding ninja swords to the list of prohibited offensive weapons. The sale of the kind of weapon that killed Ronan became illegal in the UK. Pooja said it gave her satisfaction that Ronan’s Law would protect many other children’s lives. In 2025, Pooja was presented with an OBE by King Charles, one of the UK’s highest honors.
She said she expected nothing, knew she wasn’t doing anything for anyone—she only knew it was wrong. She went straight to Ronan’s picture, smiled at him, picked up the medal, and kissed it. “I gave the OBE to him. That’s his mother’s name, but it’s all for him.
Everything is for him. ”
