This past week has felt emotionally charged and faintly surreal ever since that police bodycam footage showing the final minutes of 18-year-old Henry Nowak’s life emerged last week.
We saw Henry, a first-year finance and accountancy student with everything to live for, gasp his last words while police arrested him for ‘racial abuse’ after a false allegation by his murderer, Vickrum Digwa, who had stabbed him several times.
I cannot get that harrowing video out of my mind. I am not sure any parent who has seen it ever will.
The grief of Henry’s parents was compounded by the police’s ‘inhumane and degrading’ treatment of their son in his final moments. His father pointed out that ‘his murderer, however, was afforded decency’.
The case and ensuing debate prompted America’s Vice President JD Vance to compare Henry’s fate to the death of a civilisation. He posted on X that ‘Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies – abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.’
