GEE WALKER

ON HER MURDERED SON'S LEGACY

- BY PATRICK EDRICH and SUE LEE

TWENTY years after Anthony Walker was murdered in a racist attack, his mother still smiles at a photo of him in his school uniform, cheeky grin and all.

"He hated that picture," Dr Gee Walker, 70, says with a laugh. "He said it made his cheeks look chubby. He'd always try to take it down. I told him, 'I paid for that picture, it's staying up'.

The 18-year-old, who loved basketball and had ambitions to become a lawyer, was ambushed in a Merseyside park with his pals, his life cut short in a unprovoked assault with an ice axe.

Remarkably, Gee forgave her son's killers, saying: "Anthony stood for goodness, kindness, love, forgiveness and strength. We can't hate because there was no hate in him. We had to emulate what he stood for."

In the intervening years the teenager who "epitomised kindness" has been synonymous with the fight against racism through the work of the Anthony Walker Foundation.

In an ever-changing world, a new generation is at risk of not knowing his story. And yet Anthony's legacy - and the work of the foundation - is more important than ever.

NIGHTMARE

Referrals to the organisation's hate crime unit rocketed by 300% in the wake of the racially charged Southport riots last summer.

Gee said: "Each anniversary brings something different. It's a nightmare that always comes up. It's not something you can ever get away from.

"Up until the night he was killed he was thinking of others, he could have just run away. But if he did that, the others would have been vulnerable, and he would never have left them."