The family of a young mum strangled to death by her cannabis-addicted partner have said they are ‘tormented’ by him being allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter by diminished responsibility, saying he has been ‘absolved’ of her murder.
Kennedi Westcarr-Sabaroche, 25, was attacked with a kitchen knife and punched repeatedly in the face before being throttled in the driver’s seat of her car by Gogoa Tape, 28, in Hackney, east London, on April 5 last year.
After the attack, which lasted eight horrifying minutes, Tape, moved the charity worker’s lifeless body into the passenger’s seat, buckled her into the belt and drove away so no neighbours would discover what he had done.
Tape, known as Lois, went to buy cigarettes with Kennedi’s body still slumped in the Vauxhall Mokka and used her phone to message one of her friends pretending she was still alive.
Despite having two handsets on him – his own and Kennedi’s – Tape did not call for any help and it was another six hours before her body was found.
He was initially arrested on suspicion of and charged with murder but eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter by diminished responsibility.
Prosecutor Julia Faure Walker told Inner London Crown Court psychiatrists agree he was suffering from ‘paranoid and persecutory delusions arising from schizophrenia at the time of the killing’.
‘They consider that his ability to form a rational judgement and exercise self-control were substantially impaired, but not his ability to understand the nature of his conduct,’ she added.
Tape’s cannabis use did not cause the mental illness, the court heard, but did exacerbate it.
Kennedi’s mum and two of her sisters bravely entered the witness box and read out powerful statements setting out the impact of her death.
One of her siblings, Danielle, told the court Kennedi was ‘my first love before I became a mother’, saying they ‘became best friends’ despite a 13-year age gap.
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‘What was taken from me and everyone who loved her can never be returned,’ she said.
Danielle, who works in the mental health sector as a therapist, said: ‘How do I continue to support others when my own experience has taught me how easily the focus can shift away from the violence itself and those of us left grieving?
‘It is deeply painful that the system I contributed to now feels like it is protecting the perpetrator, not the victim.’
She continued: ‘In cases like this where mental health is a mitigating factor, it feels the focus shifts onto the person who caused the harm and away from those left grieving.
‘That has added to our pain and made the process even harder to endure.’
Another sister, Simone, struggled through tears as she described how her sibling had been killed by someone she thought of as a brother – ‘someone I thought I trusted’.
She added: ‘I am tortured by the defendant’s crime against Kennedi, but also by the fact that he is considered in the criminal court as having a mental illness which absolves him of murder.’
Kennedi’s mum, Linda, told Court Number One – which was packed with around 60 friends and relatives – she was ‘not just my daughter – she was a mother, a sister, a cousin, a granddaughter, a niece and a colleague’.
‘But above all she was our friend. She was my best friend, my soulmate. She was selfless, intelligent, strong and full of life.’
She told the court that Kennedi twice met the King while an apprentice for the Prince’s Trust and had been working at the Marie Curie cancer charity as a social media assistant.
Kennedi, Linda added, ‘gave everything’ as a mum, saying she was ‘devoted, attentive, and full of love’.
‘She adored her daughter more than anything in the world,’ she said.
‘But then she was taken from us by someone she trusted, someone we welcomed into our home and treated as family.’
Addressing Tape, she said: ‘You lived in our home for four years. We gave you love and support. Kennedi stood by you emotionally and financially.
‘You repaid her with jealousy, control, and finally fatal rage.
‘This wasn’t one life lost. This was a family shattered.’
Linda said that her granddaughter is ‘too young to understand’ what happened to her mother but added that ‘she remembers’.
But she vowed the toddler ‘will grow up in Kennedi’s legacy, not in the shadow of [Tape’s] actions.’
‘There are days when I still reach for my phone to send [Kennedi] a message or to call her, only to remember she is gone,’ Linda added.
‘While left to mourn, we must also state that violence against women is unacceptable – every child left motherless must speak loudly, clearly and without compromise.’
Kennedi was killed weeks before her daughter’s second birthday.
Ms Faure Walker said the cause of her death was ‘manual compression to the neck’.
She said: ‘There were also blunt force injuries consistent with his punching her several times and incised wounds to her hands consistent with defending herself from a knife attack.
‘The defendant had brought a kitchen knife with him.’
The court heard Tape had smoked cannabis since 2014 and had some contact with mental health services in 2023, when he was ‘warned to abstain, but would smoke cannabis afterwards’.
In April 2023, he was seen in A&E and described ‘dark thoughts that had been going on for a number of weeks… around harming others in the context of self-defence’.
In December 2023, Tape told his GP he was no longer experiencing paranoia and later admitted to cannabis use in the second half of 2023 and early 2024, the prosecution said.
On the night of the killing, on April 5 last year, Tape had armed himself with a 20cm kitchen knife and travelled to Bruce Grove station where Kennedi picked him up.
She eventually drove him to Talavera Place, in the Whiston Estate in Hackney, where she was strangled, the court heard.
Tape watched as CCTV was played to the court showing him getting out of the car, walking to the driver’s door, then ‘bending forward and lunging into the car, remaining there for about eight minutes’.
Ms Faure-Walker said Ms Westcarr-Sabaroche must have suffered from sharp force injuries from the knife while she was still conscious, and there must have been a ‘consistent period of strangulation’.
For nearly two hours, ‘with the deceased in the passenger seat, he drove around the local area, bought cigarettes, sent a message from her phone to a friend of hers, then returned to Talavera Place a few times’, the prosecutor said.
It was Tape’s brother, who was woken at about 6am to be told ‘I killed Kennedi, bro’, who called the police.
Tape’s sentencing hearing was adjourned to Monday September 1.
He has also admitted having a bladed article in a public place.
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