FORMER CLASSMATE RECALLS THEIR TIME AT SCHOOL

A FORMER classmate of Jake Davison, who shot and killed five people in the tragic mass shooting in Plymouth in 2021, has recalled in a new BBC documentary about the incident how the 22-year-old used to be “obsessed” with guns.

- SARAH LUMLEY

The chilling, one-off episode, which aired on Thursday night on BBC Three, delved into the events leading up to Davison becoming one of the UK’s most lethal killers.

His shooting spree, on August 12, 2021, which took the lives of his mother Maxine, 50, as well as Stephen Washington, 59, Kate Shepherd, 66, and father and daughter Lee and Sophie Martyn, aged 43 and three, before he finally shot himself dead, was the biggest mass shooting in Britain for a decade.

The TV documentary explored Davison’s relationship with guns – particularly, the pump-action shotgun he owned that was taken off him following an assault incident a year before the shooting, but returned to him in July 2021, just a month before the tragic event.

In separate interviews with his former classmate, named only as Emma, and one of his teachers, named only as Jonathan, both described Davison’s fascination with guns even during his school days, with Jonathan describing them as his “specialist interest”.