The Nowak Family’s Double Grief
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It’s probably the most distressing video I have seen in a long time. Along with millions of others, I watched in horror as the life faded from young Henry Nowak. He had been stabbed five times while walking home from a night out with his friends. As he lay dying on the pavement, Hampshire Police officers arrested and handcuffed him. Body-worn camera footage later showed him repeatedly saying, “I’ve been stabbed.” An officer replied: “Don’t think you have, mate.”
Even writing those words is upsetting.
How on earth must his parents have felt when they were confronted with this horror?
ITV reports that when police knocked at the family door in the early hours of 4 December 2025,
Henry’s father, Mark Nowak, fell to his knees and let out a cry his wife Katie will never forget. That was the first shattering of their world. The second came months later, when the family watched the body-worn camera footage of officers handcuffing their son as he lay dying.
“Our world has changed twice,” Katie Nowak told ITV for the documentary Dear Henry: Our Fight for Justice, which airs on 5 November. “The first time was the night we were told Henry had died. The second was when we watched that video.”
His mother, Lucy, received the same knock at her door. Officers told her there had been “an altercation” and that her son had “passed away.”
She still cannot enter his bedroom; coats hang over the door so she does not have to look at it. Sister Olivia keeps some of his T-shirts on the bed because they still smell of him.
Honestly, this is the stuff that just breaks your heart.
The casual indifference shown towards that young man by Hampshire Police is off the scale, and it rightly caused protests.
As usual, the righteous anger of the protesters was treated as the problem rather than the killing of Henry and the decision to handcuff a dying teenager who was quite clearly the victim.
In the meantime, a jury has convicted 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa of his murder. Digwa and his brother had falsely accused Henry of racial abuse, and it was this claim that triggered officers at the scene to arrest the dying young man. It is not only Digwa who should have been in the dock, but also those at the top of Hampshire Police. After all they allowed a culture in which a fatally wounded white teenager could be treated as the aggressor on the word of his killer. DEI leads to DIE.
Henry Nowak’s parents watched their son lose his life and I doubt any of us can really appreciate the anguish this has caused and how it has changed their lives. My anger is directed at his killer and those in Hampshire Police.
Yes, there is an Independent Office for Police Conduct investigation into two officers for potential gross misconduct, including whether race, religion or prejudice influenced decisions. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has alsi ordered a wider independent review, led by former lord chancellor Alex Chalk, to examine any missed opportunities to intervene before the attack and how public authorities treated the Nowak family “at a time of unimaginable pain.” Chalk has acknowledged that the family suffered the most unimaginable horror, compounded by their experience of the criminal justice system.
And I think the above is simply b*ll*cks. The two police officers failed to do the right thing at the scene but that was not some sort of random event. It seems likely that an entire strata of policing in this country are petrified of the charge “racist” and when circumstances arise, they default into doing anything that stops them being charged with it. Henry’s stabbing may have been fatal regardless of the actions of the officers but his final moments on earth are too horrible to contemplate.
Justice will not be served until ALL involved have paid a severe price.
