A 15-year-old boy who stabbed a schoolgirl to death after a row over a Snapchat video has been sentenced for her murder.
Ava White, 12, was killed in Liverpool city centre after a Christmas lights switch-on event in November 2021.
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, claimed he accidentally stabbed her in self-defence but was found guilty after a trial.
He was sentenced to life with a minimum of 13 years at Liverpool Crown Court.
The trial heard Ava and her friends became involved in an argument with the teenager and three of his friends after the boys recorded Snapchat videos of her group.
Ava’s friends said the boy “grinned” after stabbing her in the neck with a flick knife before fleeing the scene.
She was taken to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital with critical injuries and died a short time later.
The boy then dumped the knife and took off his coat, which was later found in a wheelie bin, as he began covering up his actions.
CCTV later showed him and his friends in a shop where the boy took a selfie-and bought butter, which he said was for crumpets.
He then went to a friend’s home and when his mother contacted him to tell him the police wanted to speak to him he told her he was playing a computer game.
The boy was arrested at about 22:30 GMT, just two hours after the fatal stabbing.
The court heard he denied being in the city centre at all before going on to blame another boy for the stabbing.
He later said he heard one of Ava’s group threaten to stab his friend if he did not delete a video of Ava and claimed he had wanted only to “frighten her away” and had not meant to stab her.
The girl’s mother broke down in court at the sentencing as she described her grief.
Leanne White said: “My beloved Ava dies all over again every morning I wake up.
“The moment Ava died is now yesterday, tomorrow and forever. It is the past, the present and the future.
“It is not just one horrific moment in time that happened last whenever. It is not just the moment, the hour or the second.
“Our lives became permanently divided into before and after.”
She described her daughter as a “kind-hearted little girl” and said, “precious memories are all I have left”.
