The teenager who stabbed a boy to death in the street has been named and pictured for the first time, a year after he was jailed.
L’Vaion Peniston was just 14 when he murdered 16-year-old Kennie Carter as he walked home in Stretford, Manchester, in 2022.
Peniston wasn’t able to be named during the murder case because of reporting restrictions imposed because of his age, but after his 18th birthday, the restrictions don’t apply.
Last July at Manchester Crown Court, Peniston was given the youth equivalent of a life sentence and ordered to serve at least 17 years.
Sentencing him last year, Judge Mr Justice Goose said: ‘This was yet another killing of a young person with a knife against the backdrop of gang violence.
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‘The tragedy is that not only does it destroy the lives of the victims and their families, but also those who commit the offence.’
On January 22, 2022, the defendants travelled to Stretford, where Kennie became the ‘focus of revenge’ while he walked home.
He had been on the phone with his older brother moments before he was stabbed.
Kennie told his brother after he was stabbed: ‘Oh, they’ve stabbed me in my heart, bro.’
Three other teenagers were found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter at the same trial.
Latif Ferguson, then 18, was sentenced to five years’ detention. Boy G and Boy H were sentenced to four years’ detention. Six others were cleared of murder and manslaughter.
The trial heard friends of Kennie were said to have been involved in an ‘altercation’ with others associated with the defendants, when a weapon was brought out.
He was found lying in the street shortly afterwards, as members of the public desperately tried to save him. Peniston was seen on CCTV minutes after ‘re-enacting’ the killing, demonstrating how he’d stabbed him.
Kennie’s mum, Joan Dixon, said no punishment ‘would ever be enough’ after seeing Kennie’s murderer laugh and smirk throughout a court hearing.
‘This shows me he had absolutely no remorse and broke my heart even more,’ she said in a statement read in court last year. ‘No penalty or what the court can award will ever be enough in my eyes.
‘They have taken away our Kennie from his loving family, and our lives are destroyed forever.
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