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Friends and family remembered the two younger victims as gifted athletes with a passion for life as police sought to piece together facts of a knife and van attack that murdered two 19-year-old students and another man in the English city of Nottingham on Wednesday.
Barnaby Webber and Grace Kumar, both students at Nottingham University, were fatally stabbed Tuesday morning in a street close to student housing.
According to police, a 31-year-old suspect also ran over some pedestrians, stole a man’s van, and killed a man in his 50s more than a mile (1.6 kilometres) away. In the hit-and-run, three persons were injured, one of them seriously.
Police used a stun gun to restrain the man, who was then taken into custody on suspicion of murder. The police claimed that they thought the assailant acted alone and that they were collaborating with counterterrorism investigators to attempt and determine a motivation. Authorities have not classified the act as terrorism, and they are looking at other matters, including the suspect’s mental state.
The suspect, whose identity has not been made public, is believed to be from West Africa and has resided legally in Britain for many years. He has no prior convictions, according to the BBC and other UK media.
Over the course of around 90 minutes, the rampage spread throughout a sizable portion of Nottingham, a 350,000-person university city located about 110 miles (175 kilometres) north of London.
Tuesday’s graduation ball at Nottingham University was postponed in favour of a vigil at St. Peter’s Church, where many students gathered to lay candles in memory of the deaths.
Parents and a sibling have described Webber as “a beautiful, brilliant, bright young man, with everything in life to look forward to.”
The family, from Taunton in southwest England, described the cricketer as “a talented and passionate cricketer, who was over the moon to have made selection to his university cricket team,” in a statement.
“Complete devastation is not sufficient to express our sorrow and loss at the senseless death of our son,” the statement reads.
In addition to playing hockey and cricket, Kumar represented England’s youth teams. She was praised as “a fiercely competitive, talented, and dedicated cricketer and hockey player” by the Woodford Wells Cricket Club in the London area. They also described her as “fun, friendly, and brilliant.”
