Iranian migrant killed kind elderly Yorkshire lady who gave him refuge
He strangled, bludgeoned, stabbed and slashed the neck of the selfless and popular host
In January 2022 an elderly Yorkshire woman who helped an Iranian migrant threatened with deportation, was brutally murdered by him in her own home which she had generously allowed him to move into.
Kind hearted pensioner Brenda Blainey lived in her cottage ‘The Grove’ in the quaint, picturesque village of Thornton-le-Dale in Yorkshire. She was well known and liked in the close-knit local community. She had grown up daughters, who lived away. At 88 she was becoming increasingly frail, had early Dementia and was a physically vulnerable.
On the morning of 5th January 2022, she had laid the table for breakfast for her and lodger Shahin Darvish-Narenjbon, an Iranian migrant who she had become friendly with 9 years previously, when he served her whilst working at a Carluccio’s restaurant in Leeds.
Narenjbon, born in Tehran, had first come to the UK aged 15 to study in 2003, when Tony Blair was busy working to “rub the noses of the right in diversity” by quietly doing everything possible to open UK borders to non-European migration, hoping to create ever increasing numbers of foreign-born Labour-supporting voters. His treacherous, short sighted policy was to indirectly and directly effect the whole of the native British population, but especially, Mrs Brenda Blainey.
10 years later when Narenjbon connected with Carluccio’s customer Mrs Blainey, he was studying for a Civil Engineering degree at Leeds University. An unusual friendship formed between the elderly White woman and the young Arab man, which had something of a faux grandmother/ grandson dynamic, a consequence of Mrs Blainey’s kind, generous and possibly naive character and the migrant’s need for support not provided by absent family.
Narenjbon had landed firmly on his feet in winning the trust and friendship of Mrs Blainey, and started paying visits to her home in Thornton-le-Dale. When his student visa lapsed in 2015 and his application for asylum was rejected, leaving him with the prospect of a forced return to the repressive Islamic State of Iran, she generously offered to let him to share her home, providing him with his own bedroom, study, access to her car and also making meals for him. She became something of a doting mother figure and he began living there as well as spending time at his own house on Tinshill Lane, Cookridge in Leeds.
However, even with this support from this kind British woman the stress of being made to leave the UK weighed on the Iranian and his mental state deteriorated into a dark and volatile state, with him smashing one of the doors in the home a year after living there.
In 2017 all appeal options regarding evading deportation had been exhausted, however, unknown to Narenjbon the UK government wasn’t actually able to deport him as there was no returns agreement between them and Iran. So he was kept in a state of limbo until in 2020 when he submitted another application for asylum. By this time he had finished a second masters degree at Leeds and, still living partly at Mrs Blainey’s, used her ‘The Grove’ address to register a limited architectural engineering business he was setting up. At that time, Boris Johnson’s government was starting to impose repressive Covid-19 lockdowns on the UK, which followed in 2021 with the imposition of experimental untested mRNA vaccines. By 2022 after 2 years of oppressive government over-reach and his worries of deportation, Narenjbon had arrived at a very dangerous state of mental derangement.
After laying the table for breakfast, Brenda Blainey phoned her local corner shop to place a food order. Whilst she was on the phone the shop-keepers noticed the conversation suddenly cut out and the line went dead. Concerned, whilst delivering, the shopkeeper stopped by ‘The Grove’ to check Mrs Blainey was OK.
He arrived to find the home surrounded by emergency service vehicles and police. He was to shortly discover that whilst she had been talking to his wife on the phone Brenda had been brutally attacked.
Inside Narenjbon said to Police that there had been a break in and some men had attacked Blainey. However as police questioned further, it became apparent that this wasn’t true. From their questioning of the suspect combined with looking at the evidence of the woman’s injuries they concluded she had been on the phone when Narenjbon had launched his attack, strangling her, repeatedly smashing her head against the tiled floor causing unconsciousness, he had then used the knife to cut her throat, severing her jugular vein after which he had stabbed her several times in the chest.
On realising the enormity of what he had just done he then washed the knife and phoned the police and pretended someone else had carried out the murder. Mrs Blainey died shortly after the emergency services arrived. Narenjbon later confessed saying he had heard voices saying to kill her. He’d had a vision of a big red button, which he had pressed giving him permission to kill Blainey.
In February 2023 Narenjbon was sentenced at Leeds Crown Court. Taking into consideration the killer’s Schizophrenic, psychotic state when he carried out the murder exacerbated by the draconian government lockdowns Judge Rodney Jameson KC charged him with manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He said during the sentencing:
“You killed Brenda Blainey in her own home in circumstances of appalling brutality.
I want to make it clear both to you and to the family of Brenda Blainey that this is not to say that your responsibility is extinguished; it is not.
You remain, albeit to a low degree, responsible for the dreadful death of Mrs Blainey and for the grief and suffering that this has caused to her friends and family.”
Speaking afterwards, North Yorkshire Police acting Det Supt, Graeme Wright, said Mrs Blainey had
“lost her life after showing immense kindness to a young man who she identified was in need of support.”[5]
Acting Detective Superintendent Graeme Wright of North Yorkshire Police said:
“This is an incredibly tragic incident in which Brenda lost her life after showing immense kindness to a young man who she identified was in need of support.
Brenda was well-known in the local community for her compassion in helping people and had taken Darvish-Narenjbon into her home, giving him a place to live and treating him as a member of her family.”[5]
Article Sources
- https://www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/news/23286824.iranian-grandson-killed-brenda-blainey-thornton-le-dale/
- https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/crime/thornton-le-dale-graduate-brutally-killed-surrogate-grandmother-who-had-given-him-a-place-to-stay-in-her-yorkshire-cottage-after-meeting-him-in-carluccios-4007055
- https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/23292712.thornton-le-dale-murder-shahin-darvish-narenjbon-detained-hospital/
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-64486669
- https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/failed-asylum-seeker-who-killed-29113963
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11702459/Man-murdered-pensioner-87-detained-psychiatric-hospital-spared-deportation-Iran.html
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