Life term for girl in Afro comb murder

Rebecca Douglas, who was 15 at the time, spiked 16-year-old 
Julie Sheriff’s head with the pointed metal handle.

Douglas, who had been sleeping rough at friends’ houses, was ordered to serve a minimum of 10 years after being convicted of murder last month.

The Old Bailey heard the pintail comb had been taken out of Julie’s red weave hair before being used as a lethal weapon in the attack in Battersea, south London, in May last year.

Julie, of Hackney, east London, never recovered from the swelling and bleeding it caused to her brain and died almost five months later, in September.

Yesterday, Judge Nicholas Cooke warned parents to be aware of the dangers to young girls wearing such combs as “fashion accessories”.

“It can be as effective a killing instrument as a stiletto knife,” he added. “It is not a very nice thing to have in your hair.”

Judge Cooke said she had killed Julie in “hate-filled fury” after they argued in the street about mobile phone messages.

The girls knew and disliked one another, and had met in the street by chance on the fatal day.

Each girl gave as good as she got until Douglas took the comb, which a friend said Julie was in the habit of wearing in her hair.

Jonathan Kinnear QC, for Douglas, said she had a traumatic and violent childhood. She had not meant to kill Julie, who had moved to Britain with her family in 2006 from Sierra Leone, West Africa, where her father was a policeman.

A witness saw the defendant strike Julie’s collarbone without much effect and then plunge the comb into her skull.

The victim’s father Raouf told the court in a statement: “I am left to wonder why I brought her here and if I hadn’t, she would still be alive.”