By George Palmer-Soady
The mum of a young Nottinghamshire man fatally stabbed while on holiday abroad has called for better community support for grieving families of knife crime victims.
Alison Castledine says her family’s life has never been the same since the death of her son Danny.
The 22-year-old student from Mansfield was stabbed in an unprovoked attack in Amsterdam and died on June 1, 2022.
At an event supporting a Nottingham knife crime exhibition aimed at schoolchildren, Mrs Castledine called for better community support for the families of victims.
“The support needs to go on for far longer,” she said.
“It’s not a two-minute thing and then we all move on and it’s okay – this goes on for years and years.
“When you lose someone naturally, you grieve and time is a healer. With Danny’s death, time is not a healer because you are always watching.
“We see Danny’s friends and they’ve got girlfriends, and you wonder if Danny would have a girlfriend. His friends are graduating and you wonder what Danny would have got if he had graduated.”
Mrs Castledine spoke to Notts TV at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, where she and her daughter Chloe have contributed to a ‘Choices and Consequences’ exhibition, part of which includes family videos and photographs of Danny.
It aims to teach schoolchildren about the reality of knife crime for families and victims in the hope of preventing more deaths in the future.
Mrs Castledine added: “Everybody’s there at the beginning, but it goes very quickly. We’re almost two and a half years down the line, and we’ve still got to wait another year for an appeal.”
Danny’s killer, a Belgian man referred to in Dutch courts as Nongo B – was captured soon afterwards and jailed for 14 years in January after being convicted of manslaughter. He is now appealing the sentence on the basis it was too harsh.
His trial was told the attack was unprovoked and Danny was stabbed 44 times.
Mrs Castledine added: “That’s going to be three and a half years before we get even the court process out of our system. Some of the families we’ve met have been waiting ten years for justice, and people have forgotten about you by that time and I think people need to remember this stays with you forever.”
The Castledine Family set up the Danny C Foundation charity following his death. It aims to tackle knife crime through working with local charities and other organisations.
Danny’s sister Chloe said: “It emphasises that I’m a real person, Danny is a real person and we had a whole life before this happened.
“This is the reality, it’s not just something you see on YouTube or TikTok or reading the news. It’s showing [pupils] that this is a real person who has lost their life who isn’t much older than you.
“You don’t want to be the next person that has an exhibition opened up in your name.”
The exhibition, which is the third of its kind in the UK, was created with the support of the Ben Kinsella Trust. The charity was set up following the death of its namesake in 2008, who was stabbed aged 16 after going out to celebrate his GCSE results.
A room dedicated to Ben at the exhibition shows a letter he had written only a few months before his death, addressed to then-PM Gordon Brown. In it, the late 16-year-old shares his concerns about gang culture and crime, asking the government of the day to address the issue.
Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner Gary Godden told people at the event he and the new Labour government will make knife crime one of its key priorities.
The Ben Kinsella trust’s chief executive Patrick Green also warned the concerns Ben shared in his letter are still as relevant today.
He said: “We have not done enough to make young people safe and all we have given them is generation after generation of knife crime. I’m just pleased that we have the ear of the government to tackle this, but it’s not about kind words or a commitment to do something.
“This is vital work – we do not want the next generation growing up with the clouds of knife crime hanging over their heads.”
While there has been a 10 per cent reduction in knife crime in Nottingham in the past four years, Notts Police figures show an average of around two knife crimes have been recorded every day in Nottinghamshire since 2020.
Two-thirds of knife crime convictions in the county were first-time offenders between September 2022 and September 2023, according to Ministry of Justice figures.
The exhibition is free for all Nottingham City Council and Nottinghamshire County Council school pupils, and group sessions for school children can be run any day in the week, the museum says.
Children as young as 10 are encouraged to attend, with more than 2,000 children having already taken part in workshops since the exhibition first opened in 2019.
