And I remember he had a knife in his right hand,
so I said to myself, 'When I turn around,
I'm gonna try to deflect the knife by doing that.'
As I've done that, he took a step back,
and just went bang in my neck.
So I grew up in Tottenham, that's North London area.
My mum was always around.
My dad was there.
Had a lot of brothers, a lot of sisters.
My friends that I grew up with, you know, a lot of them
were into... you could call it 'the bad boy lifestyle',
you know what I mean?
Like, it's no secret, I ran with the best of them.
I wasn't in a gang, but I'd hang around
with a whole lot of gang members, like, that was no secret.
[BECKY] So tell me about that first stabbing then.
My sister phoned me, she's crying,
and I was like, "What's wrong, sis?"
and she's like, she started to explain
that her and her boyfriend had an argument
that got kind of physical.
I must have went down to a place in Tottenham
called Broadwater Farm.
I'm just a young guy, you know, I come from a big family.
I've never lost a fight.
I'm not a bully, but at the same time,
I'm going to defend my sister, right.
So as I've got out of the car,
he's pulled out his gun and I've walked up to him,
and I said,
"You're gonna shoot me and live with that, bro?"
He put the gun back in his waist and what I've done,
I've literally... you can imagine,
he's got the gun in his waist.
I've put my hand over the gun and kind of latched my finger
into his trouser like that and held it like that.
So I know there's no way he can move that gun
and then I was in his face and we just talking,
and I'm saying, "Bruv, if you wanna fight someone,
fight me."
And then at that time, my friend that's been in jail
for, like, I dunno, he's in jail for a lot of years,
I heard, "Faron!" and I turned around, I saw my friend.
I was like, "Yo, what's going on?"
And I embraced him to say hi
and then about 30 seconds after, I heard, "Oi."
I got stabbed in my chest,
where my heart would've been, under my arm,
do you know what I mean?
It was like, places where there's vital organs. In my belly.
So I believe that he had intentions to really hurt me.
[BECKY] Why did you not report it to the police?
I'll be real.
Police are something I've never done in terms of
reporting stuff, you know.
I've grown up on the streets
and my family's from the streets.
I ran the streets, like, I've still got bad boy friends,
you know what I mean?
But it just wasn't a part of who I was
to call police.
I knew the family, they knew me.
We came to our arrangements, everything settled down,
that was the end of it.
[BECKY] Could you now talk about the second time?
I got a phone call from my girlfriend and she's like,
I could just hear a lot of commotion in the background.
She basically said she got into an altercation
and a guy hit her.
So I went back to find my girlfriend.
So I've got back there,
and the person that hit her was just standing there
like he'd done nothing wrong.
So I confronted him and I said,
"Bruv, why are you hitting my girlfriend for?"
And then basically me and him got into an altercation,
we had a fight, just a physical fight,
it happened in the shop,
and then I remember coming out of the shop.
I went to the car, to get back into the car,
and something just said, 'Look behind you.'
I looked behind me and I just saw this guy
with, like, the longest kitchen knife,
I just remember it, like, a big, silver kitchen knife.
I remember him chasing me,
so I started to run around the car, run around the car
trying to get away from him.
So every time I got to one side of the car,
he was kind of like on the next side of the car
with the knife
and I was like, "Damn,"
and then he opened the car door,
and at that time he opened the car door
to where my missus was sitting.
So I'm like, "Damn."
Like, now he's going towards her with a knife.
At that time, so I've jumped back over towards the car,
started fighting him again to defend her
and I remember he had a knife in his right hand,
so I said to myself, 'When I turn around,
I'm gonna try to deflect the knife by doing that.'
As I've done that, he took a step back
and just went bang in my neck.
It felt like a circuit broke.
I had a big flash of white, it went 'bing'.
I just heard my ears ringing, like, 'riiiing'.
I didn't know what was going on
and after that, as soon as he done that,
my arm just dropped to the side, boom,
and then he came at me and he started stabbed me again
and then he stabbed me
and he stabbed me and I fell on the floor.
This is when he stabbed me across my chest here,
after he stabbed me twice.
So the first stab I got was in my neck,
then the second stab in my neck
and then I got stabbed in my...
I got a big scar across here, he stabbed me there.
I believe because I got stabbed the first time,
and I had something to kind of compare it against,
I knew that I was already in much more trouble
than the first time, if you know what I mean.
The blood, the pain, not being able to move my arm,
and after that, I went straight from thinking
'I've been defeated' to 'I can hear police sirens'.
Yeah, so the police woman talks to me,
she's like, "What's going on, we heard there's a fight?"
I was like, "No, no, there was no fight, I'm cool."
She's like, "No, listen, we heard there's a fight here.
You're involved, cream jacket."
And after, she's like, she looked at me and she went,
"Code red, code red, code red, multiple stab wounds."
Like, my top was just turning red by the second,
but I've got a cream one on - I remember my neck's cut,
my belly's cut, like, blood's just coming from me now.
She's like, "Code red, code red, code red."
She put me on the floor.
She's like, "Get an ambulance."
And next thing I remember, they put me
in that ambulance and the first thing I kept saying
to the doctor, "I can't move my arm, I can't move my arm.
Why can't I move my arm?"
They didn't care about that,
because at that time I'd already lost 40% of my blood.
So they were just trying to stop me from losing blood now.
The last thing I remember hearing was my mum scream,
my mum scream,
and I remember, like, trying to like put myself
to have a strong face, like there's nothing wrong with me,
but like, you know what I mean? It's my mum, innit?
And then after that, I just remember waking up
two days later in the hospital.
So the doctor sat me down, he said to me,
"Faron, I've got good news for you and I've got bad news."
He said, "You have got severe nerve damage.
It's been cut straight through.
But the good news is..."
I said, "What's the good news?"
He said, "One percent of the whole human population's
got your body structure."
I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "Out of 6.2 billion people, only 1% are like you."
He said, "Your arteries are under more muscle.
You have spare nerves that we can use
and we feel you've got a heart rate
under 60 beats a minute, and we really do believe
that you can have a good recovery rate
if we do the surgery when we do."
I'm talking about... my arm is dead,
like, I couldn't even move it.
Like, I was getting, I was burning my hand
and not realising until the next day,
until I had blisters, that's how bad it was.
So I had to build up everything again,
from my emotions, to my mindset, to my physical...
Like, just to get back to where I could be, you know.
[BECKY] How long did the rehabilitation take?
I'd say physically, it took the best part
of five to 10 years.
You know, nerves grow back a millimetre a day,
and you've got to assist that with diet, good diet,
and sleep and physiotherapy and goodwill.
Do you know what I mean? It's not easy.
[BECKY] Could you just explain to us how many times you were stabbed in total?
Oh, so literally... it's weird, man,
because it's just loads of nines,
I had nine children in my family.
I got stabbed nine times on one occasion.
I got stabbed nine times on another occasion.
So altogether I got stabbed 18 times.
[BECKY] It would be great if you could first explain to me
how you started off your anti-knife crime.
So I started to do, like, little social media vlogs,
Facebook here and there,
and it's just me giving advice about the life
I've been through and how children can avoid
getting in the same situation
and just various little things,
and after a while, I sat down and said to myself,
'You know what, I'm sitting down doing these videos, yeah,
and all I've gotta do is scroll up the Facebook feed
and then I'm gonna see someone's been stabbed and killed.'
Like, I just felt like, it just felt so pointless to me.
So I sat down to myself and I thought,
'How can I help this situation more?'
And I said, 'Okay, if I could take these knives
from these children, the way I see it,
if you ain't got a knife in your hand, you can't use it.'
And if any child is gonna come to the point
where you are saying, 'You know what?
I wanna hand you my knife,'
you've really started a mental transition for the better
because you are deciding to give your knife away, right.
So I was trying to come up with a way that'd be beneficial
to these kids.
I don't really wanna be giving people money
for a Rambo knife, that they're gonna go and
buy another one with, or buy something silly with,
you know what I mean?
So I said to myself, 'Alright then, JD Sports vouchers.'
I said, 'What young child wouldn't want £20
off their pair of trainers?' You know what I'm saying?
For that Rambo knife that's been in their house,
just sitting there for the last four years
that no one cares about.
So I put that out and literally, from 2019 to this day,
I'm inundated with messages about collections
and it's not only the young people who I started
my target audience with.
Like, it's just become, like, a whole community thing.
I've got parents, I've got social workers,
I've got children,
I've got members of the public that find stuff
and they contact me to get rid of them.
[BECKY] Initially how did the police react to what you were doing?
The police react... I was getting arrested.
I was getting handcuffed.
I was getting literally strip-searched and everything
at first, but I feel like they felt kind of undermined
by what I was doing, to an extent.
I believe they feel the accountability
would be a thing as well.
You know, if anything did happen, you know,
you gotta think about who's gonna come
and deal with the problem - the police,
you know what I'm saying?
I've got to the stage where I've built up, like,
enough of a relationship with the community
and the local authorities
that they understand what I'm doing.
I won't be arrested when I've got the knives.
I've recently gone into a weapons pilot
with the local authorities where they just make sure
that I've got a medical kit in the car, a phone,
and I just report the area that I'm going.
They don't want a direct name,
they don't want a direct person,
they just wanna know the area where I picked up from,
that the pickup went well and where I'm dropping it to,
and then that's it.
[BECKY] How many weapons have you collected?
The last check we've done,
it was just over 1,200 swords and knives.
17 axes, nunchucks, a shotgun, two handguns, a replica
and two tasers.
In terms of people that message me for collections, man,
there's a big variety of them.
Mothers, well, I'd say it's the young men first themselves.
I've seen so much relief from some of them, you know,
they've got stuff in their house, yeah, that
they can get in trouble for,
that can hurt their son,
that their son can get in a lot of trouble for
and when I take it and remove it from there,
the relief in some of them is like,
it is a good feeling to know
that I'm the person who did something that they never had
anyone else that could do.
[BECKY] How old is the youngest you’ve collected a knife from?
11.
A young, impulsive, naive child
who's driven by social media and materialistic stuff,
gets a knife in his hand,
he ain't gonna know the severity of stabbing someone
until he's sitting in jail, knowing that he's gonna have
another 10 years to do, or he's urinating
through some sort of medical device or he's dead.
[BECKY] How many weapons are out there on the streets of London?
Well, all I know is that Metropolitan Police
donate up to two tons a month of knives.
If you wanna start adding guns to that, man,
it's just, I dunno, what kind of weight's gonna come up?
[BECKY] What kind of change are you hoping to make in the future?
I really wanna start cracking down in these schools.
The first person who's really unsafe
if someone's got stabbed, it's gonna be that person's friend
or that person's family
and if you know that it only takes a matter of minutes
for someone to bleed out,
depending on the way they've been stabbed
and if these young children are taught how to conduct
first aid and how to put a tourniquet on
and things like that, I really do feel like that can be
like the difference between life
and death in certain situations.
We're just trying to get a lot done
in terms of education for the children in schools,
but I feel like prevention's better than cure right now.
I work closely with an organisation called Steel Warriors.
They're an organisation that take metal donated
from the police, in terms of knives,
and then they melt them down into gyms, for outdoor gyms
and I feel like it's just... like, it works, you know.
The knives come here from a bad place and they go there
and get melted down and put into something
that's gonna be a good thing, you know?
So I feel like that's the full transition there, it works.
[BECKY] Do you ever get scared of going to collect these weapons?
Do you know what, yeah,
no, I don't get scared doing it.
It makes me feel good doing it.
I genuinely feel if the community weren't supporting me,
I don't feel like I'd be doing what I'm doing.
I sat there and I thought about it.
Will there be a time when I get a message
and someone wants to hand a knife in and then I say,
'I'm not doing it'?
And to this day, I just...
I don't feel I can come up with the excuse or the words 'no,
I'm not coming to get it'.
[BECKY] What you tell someone who has a weapon and is willing to hand it in?
Contact me, hand it in anonymously.
Like, there'd be no problems.
I'd take the weapon off you, I'd hand it in
and you can be sure that it's out of your way,
no longer your problem and you won't get in trouble for it.
If you carry a knife and you're not willing to hand it in,
just make sure you're willing to go to jail
or you're willing to die.
There's no more to it.
Live by the knife, die by the knife, it's that simple.