Richard Cromarty
1937 – 2003
Maidstone, Kent
Perpetrator
Richard Cromarty was a 66-year-old man from Maidstone whose life was tragically taken on 15 July 2003 in his own block of flats.
A quiet, polite and unassuming neighbour who lived alone in a top-floor bedsit on Kingsley Road, he is remembered by those who knew him as a gentle man who deserved to live out his final years in peace and safety.
He was stabbed more than twenty times in a frenzied and unprovoked attack by his next-door neighbour in the same building. Richard managed to stagger into the street calling desperately for help; his final words — captured on a neighbour’s security camera — were “Help me, help me, been stabbed, help. It’s that Iraqi — just stabbed me with this.”
He was rushed to Maidstone Hospital but died about an hour later from multiple stab wounds, the fatal one penetrating his heart.
The attacker was Sherzad Muhamed, a 28-year-old Iraqi man (an asylum-seeker living in the same house), who was convicted of murder at Maidstone Crown Court in October 2004 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 12 years.
Rest in peace Richard. You will not be forgotten.