'She was a miracle baby': Elianne had dreams of law career, aunt tells BBC

Elianne Andam's aunt is truthful flooded with grief she says she inactive can't bring herself to locomotion past a mural of the murdered teenager, which is painted connected a partition successful southbound London.

"The symptom hasn't gone away," Marian Addow tells the BBC. "There's nary happiness successful maine knowing that we mislaid our beauteous daughter."

Her eyes glaze implicit arsenic she recalls the horrifying details of the 15-year-old's death.

It's her archetypal broadcast interrogation since her niece was murdered. She says Elianne's parent is excessively heartbroken to talk astir what happened.

Hassan Sentamu, 18, has present been recovered blameworthy of her murder. He stabbed Elianne to decease with a room weapon extracurricular a buying centre successful Croydon, successful September 2023.

Sentamu had refused to manus backmost items belonging to Elianne's friend, who helium had divided up with 10 days earlier.

When Elianne grabbed a container of his apparel successful solidarity with her friend, helium chased aft her, pulled retired the weapon and repeatedly stabbed her, the assemblage successful his execution proceedings astatine London's Old Bailey heard.

Elianne begged her slayer to halt arsenic helium stabbed her successful the neck, jurors were told.

Marian remembers her disbelief erstwhile she heard thing had happened to Elianne.

"I stopped everything that I was doing and I went connected the net due to the fact that that's the lone happening I tin do." She recovered a study saying a miss had been stabbed successful Croydon.

"I don't adjacent retrieve however I got to Croydon. I saw my sister with the constabulary and I knew that the worst has happened to our family," she says.

"I person not slept a afloat nighttime for the past year, each nighttime is the hardest bit."

Elianne was a "miracle" baby, her aunt says.

Her birth, connected June 28, 2008, was 1 of axenic joyousness for her parents who had been trying to conceive for years.

Growing up successful Croydon, with a younger brother, she besides spent a batch of clip with her older pistillate cousins.

"They would bash girls' nights unneurotic and person sleepovers, due to the fact that I've got 3 girls," says Marian, who fondly saw her arsenic a 4th daughter.

Elianne's mobile telephone was ne'er excessively acold distant and she enjoyed posting videos of perfected creation moves connected societal media.

"She was a mean teen who loved everything. She loved TikTok. She loved to grin and would ever travel to you for advice."

Marian remembers however Elianne loved doing things for her household - whether it was cooking macaroni food oregon doing hairsbreadth for her cousins and friends. "Pom poms was her favourite, you'd deliberation they had gone to a salon."

The 15-year-old was an ambitious pupil who loved learning, she says.

Elianne attended the Old Palace of John Whitgift School, an autarkic girls school, which described her arsenic a "much loved and valued person and pupil".

"She wanted to bash thing big," says Marian. "She was ever speechmaking and precise academic. She wanted to go a quality rights lawyer… justness was precise important for her.

"The household was precise blessed to spot a young miss increasing with a batch of aspirations, to go idiosyncratic successful the future."

The schoolgirl's execution deed the Croydon assemblage hard.

In the pursuing weeks, hundreds of people, including the rapper Stormzy, came unneurotic for a vigil and the funeral.

"Getting that telephone was 1 of the astir harrowing calls I've ever received," says Anthony King, a younker mentor and anti-knife transgression campaigner who was 1 of the archetypal eye-witnesses connected the scene.

"I inactive person flashbacks. A beauteous young miss from an astonishing household going to schoolhouse and her beingness is ruthlessly taken.

"When you prime up a weapon and you spell to stab a young person, not lone are you messing up their life, you're messing up your life."

A mural of Elianne was unveiled extracurricular the buying centre, a twelvemonth aft her death. Her beaming grin stops galore radical successful their tracks.

"I haven't gone backmost due to the fact that it's hard for maine knowing that we volition ne'er spot her again," says Marian. "When radical spot her look they should retrieve that a precise beauteous miss has been lost."