Andre Bent: Murdered man’s daughter gives family ‘reason to wake up’

A woman whose brother was stabbed to death on a night out said his baby has given his family “reasons to wake up in the morning”.

Andre Bent, 21, from Lambeth, was murdered by 16-year-old Vaslios Ofogeli outside the Gallery Nightclub in Maidstone in August 2019.

Andre’s girlfriend found out she was pregnant on the day he died. His daughter Neriah is now nearly two years old.

Ofogeli is serving a 20-year sentence.

The attack followed a performance at the venue by rapper MoStack.

An online documentary celebrating Andre’s life will be released later, with the aim of raising awareness about knife crime.

Michaela Bent, Andre’s older sister, said: “There’s a lot to look forward to, reasons to wake up in the morning and reasons to smile. You can’t stop and get depressed when you’ve got to look after a baby.”

Baby Neriah lives with her mother but spends time with her father Andre’s family regularly.

Ms Bent added: “I wish Andre would have met his daughter. Even now she looks at pictures of him, and kisses the phone and kisses pictures of him.

“It’s like, ‘wow you haven’t even met him and you have so much love.’ That’s beautiful. I wish I could have seen how he would have been.

“He would have loved her, he would have shown her off, she is so beautiful. I think he’d be a really good dad.”

Ms Bent said: “I find it really difficult. When you’re down it’s easy to go into that spiral.

“I do think about it sometimes when it’s about three o’clock in the morning on a Sunday. I do think about what I was doing that night and how we found out.

“Sometimes the video does flash in my mind of the actual events. I don’t allow myself to think about it too much.

“Because it is online for the rest of the world to see, it kind of does haunt you. Some people when they go through grief they become fixated, they watch things loads of times.

“I just needed to watch it the once to have it stained on my mind.”


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