Mother of Brianna Ghey brands her young killers ‘cowards’

Brianna, 16, was stabbed 28 times with a hunting knife to her head, neck and chest after she was lured to a park near Warrington, Cheshire, on the afternoon of February 11 2023.

Her killers, a 16-year-old girl from Warrington and a 16-year-old boy from Leigh, both tried to blame each other for the stabbing but were found guilty of murder last month at Manchester Crown Court.

Next week, girl X and boy Y – who were aged 15 at the time – will be named when a judge will hand out life sentences and set the minimum terms they must serve in custody before they can be considered for release.

On Wednesday, Esther Ghey, the mother of the transgender teenager, said she wanted those minimum terms to be “as long as possible”.

In an interview on ITV1’s Good Morning Britain, she said: “I don’t know whether justice will ever be done for Brianna. It would be nice to have her back home. That would be justice for me but obviously, that isn’t going to happen.

“Knowing that they are going to prison and they are going to have a long time, if not forever, is a massive relief because during the trial it was a rollercoaster of emotion as you always had that little seed of doubt that maybe the jury would come to the decision that they were not guilty. So hearing that guilty plea – it was just a massive sense of relief.

“The fact that they both pointed the finger at each other shows that they are cowards really and it shows the character of each of them. Maybe if they had admitted or shown a little remorse, I may have felt some sympathy for them.”

Ms Ghey has launched a campaign, Peace in Mind, in memory of Brianna, which aims to support children to process and deal with negative emotions in a healthy way.

She said: “When Brianna was here she actually struggled with her mental health. She was self-harming, she had an eating disorder, she had anxiety. So she was so complex because on one side she was such a confident person but on the other side she had all these difficulties.

“Because of my experience with Brianna, I wanted to help other young people so we started the ‘Peace in Mind’ campaign and we are so close to the target now.

“We are hoping to get a mental health coach in every school in Warrington and we are hoping to get this spread out across England as well. I am in talks with our local MP and hopefully, we are going to get it in Parliament.”