Boy, 15, found guilty of software engineer’s murder at Redditch Asda | UK news

A 15-year-old boy has been convicted of murdering a supermarket shopper, who was stabbed in the chest after a row in an Asda car park in Redditch.

Ian Kirwan, a 53-year-old software engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, was stabbed on 8 March last year after a confrontation with five boys outside the supermarket. He died before he reached hospital.

The five youths, who cannot be named due to their age, were on trial at Birmingham crown court for Kirwan’s murder, with one defendant found guilty.

Jurors cleared three other youths – two aged 14 and one aged 16 – of murder and manslaughter but found them guilty of violent disorder.

A fifth boy, aged 16, was acquitted of murder, manslaughter and violent disorder, having claimed he was not involved in the fatal confrontation and could not have predicted it.

The court heard the group of five were part of a larger group of 11 youths who had travelled from Birmingham to Redditch by train, with witnesses describing their behaviour on the train as unruly.

Train cameras captured a knife sticking out of the pocket of one of the boys.

Prosecutor Benjamin Aina KC told the court the group then headed to a branch of Asda where five of them made their way to the toilets and started banging on a cubicle door.

“At about 7.15pm in the evening, Ian Kirwan went into Asda and entered the customer toilets. When he did so he came into contact with a group of five young males who were messing about in the toilets,” he said.

“A little later he left the toilets, he left the Asda store and some of these boys were outside. He challenged them, ‘Why were you messing about in the toilet?’, words to that effect, and a scuffle broke out and during that scuffle Ian Kirwan was stabbed once to his heart with a knife and he died before getting to the hospital.”

One witness described the confrontation as a “scuffle” that lasted no more than 30 seconds: “If you had blinked you would have missed it, put it that way.”

All those convicted will be sentenced, at the same court, on 15 February.