'The spirit of my son Damilola will always be with us'

It has been 24 years since the killing of schoolboy Damilola Taylor. In an emotional last interview, his father Richard, who died at the weekend, tells Anthony France about the importance of hope in continuing his son’s legacy

- Anthony France

HOPE. This is the word that Richard Taylor — the father of child knife crime victim Damilola Taylor — said he wanted to be remembered by in the final interview before his death on Saturday.

“Young people need hope,” the OBEawarded knife crime campaigner told me in his last-ever newspaper interview back in November, before his secret cancer battle was made public this weekend. “It may not be rosy for them but hope is there for them to work towards and they will get it. They don’t need to despair. There is so much ahead for them.”

Taylor’s 10-year-old son Damilola was on his way home from the library when he was stabbed in the leg with a broken beer bottle and left to die in a stairwell in Peckham in 2000. It shocked the nation and become one of London’s most high-profile killings, prompting Taylor and his late wife Gloria to establish the Damilola Taylor Trust in his memory, steering young people away from knife crime and funding places for inner city school students to study medicine.