That’s My Mum’ – Heartbroken Mum Turned Anti-Knife Campaigner After Son’s Brutal Murder
It was a sunny Sunday in 2021 when Zoe Cooke was preparing lunch, expecting her son Byron to pop over. The 22-year-old had just called to say he’d be round soon. “Alright Mum, I love you,” he said. “Love you too, darling,” she replied. Minutes later, her world collapsed.
Zoe, now 51, received a chilling call that no parent should ever have to take. On the other end, she heard a scream: “Byron’s been stabbed – he’s been stabbed!”, according to the Daily Star.
Byron had been attacked in Eyre’s Garden, Ilkeston, Derbyshire, stabbed twice – once in the arm and once in the chest. Zoe rushed to Queen’s Medical Centre, gripped by panic, begging doctors, “Where’s my son?”
He was airlifted in, but Zoe knew it was serious. “The ambulance pulled up and a doctor got out – he was saturated in blood,” she recalled. “They gave him open heart surgery on the scene and I could see everything. They whizzed him past me. I couldn’t even touch him.”
Byron didn’t make it. Zoe describes those moments as a blur, like watching someone else’s life unfold. “I was numb – that’s the only way to describe it.” She had to identify him four days later. “When I saw him I hugged him and I cried, but I was still in a state of shock.”
Byron, she said, was outgoing, funny, a mummy’s boy through and through. “His friends used to laugh and say, ‘Why would you tell your mum that?’ and he’d say, ‘She’s my best friend. I tell her everything.’” He adored his sisters, protective of one and playful with the younger. “He loved them both to pieces.”
In 2022, justice came when four people were convicted of Byron’s murder and sentenced to life. But for Zoe, there’s no moving on – only moving forward.
Consumed by grief and searching for answers, she came across bleed kits – emergency first aid packs used to stop heavy bleeding. “I thought, I can’t let him have died in vain.” Since then, she’s raised funds to install over 100 kits across Nottingham and works with young people to show the real-life impact of knife crime.
Her efforts earned her the Pride of Britain regional fundraiser award in 2023. “If I can change the way a few kids think, then I’ve done something for him,” she said. “He used to hate seeing me cry. If he’s looking down, I want him to think, ‘That’s my mum.’”
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