Former BBNaija star, Khafi Kareem says as a Met police officer she had comforted many victims’ families but nothing prepared her for the heartbreak when her brother was randomly killed.
When Khafi Kareem received the call on a June morning urgently summoning her to the family home, her first instinct was that there had been an accident. ‘My brother said it was about Alex, but he couldn’t tell me over the phone,’ she recalls.
‘The worst thing I could think of was that my little brother had been injured somehow. Not for a minute did I think he was dead, and not in a million years would I ever have thought he’d been shot.’
But 20-year-old Alex — a sunny-natured young man who’d never been in trouble and was due to start university — had been gunned down as he left a shop near home in west London.
His last words as he lay dying on the pavement were ‘help me’. For his parents and three siblings, the loss of the baby of the family has proved devastating. Their grief is horribly compounded by the knowledge that police believe his promising life was taken in a case of mistaken identity.
Their agony has also been heightened by the assumptions that so often accompany the death of a young black man in London. ‘People hear about the death of a black boy on the street and assume that he was in a gang, that it’s a case of live by the gun, die by the gun,’ is how Khafi, 30, puts it. ‘But Alex couldn’t be further away from that life.
‘It is just a shame that you have to fight that prejudice first, before people can feel sorry about Alex or feel sad about what happened.’
It is one reason she has decided to grant this interview, anxious to pay tribute to her much-loved brother and show ‘another side to the story of a black boy’s life in London.’
While the investigation continues into Alex’s murder, detectives have reiterated their belief that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and was not the intended target of his killers.
Alex — named after Alexander the Great — was the youngest, and all his siblings were protective. ‘All of us wanted to look after him, so that’s what made everything so much more painful because any of us would have said we’d take the bullet for him,’ she says, her eyes filling with tears.
DailyMail