An activist associated with Extinction Rebellion stabbed her boyfriend to death as he pleaded with her, saying “I love you.”
Blaze Lily Wallace, 28, a law student, was sentenced to life in prison on Monday after she followed her fiance Samuel Mayo down the street after a domestic dispute last summer. She fatally wounded him in the process, per The Telegraph.
Witnesses claimed that they heard Mayo shout: “Please Blaze. I love you, please Blaze.” He ultimately bled to death on the side of the road, begging for someone to call the ambulance.
The jury in the three-week trial was made up of eight women and four men at Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court. They unanimously found Wallace guilty of murder and possessing an offensive weapon after just over ten hours of deliberation.
The court previously heard how the two argued while under the influence of cocaine, cannabis, and heroin in the back garden of Wallace’s home in Mortlake on July 18, 2022.
Wallace followed Mayo onto the street about six minutes after the dispute. CCTV footage revealed that she was in pursuit of him, armed with a kitchen knife in her pocket. She eventually caught up to him outside Stag Brewery.
The police arrived on the scene at 9:57 pm and immediately recognized Mayo as a local drug user. He was known to have begged outside Tesco’s and Mortlake train station, per the report.
He was eventually taken to Kingston Hospital and pronounced dead at 10:33 pm.
Wallace claimed that Mayo was armed with a sharpened wooden chopstick, and that she was using the knife to warm him off. The jury rejected this defense.
“I put the knife out as a deterrent to get back and he lunged forward and I did not get a chance to pull the knife back,” she told the jury.
“It was horrible. I did not mean any impact, I meant to gesture for him to get back,” she added.
However, when the police arrived at Wallace’s home at 1:00 am that night, she did not provide the same chopstick explanation she gave the jury.
She told the jury why she didn’t want to speak with the officers, saying: “My dad told me not to say anything and I had no solicitor. I did not want to spend the night in a cell, it was overwhelming.”
Wallace graduated from St. Mary's University, Twickenham with a law degree in 2017. At the time she was arrested, she was one month shy of completing her Masters in Human Rights and Legal Practice at the University of Roehampton. She had expressed interest in working abroad as a human rights lawyer in Germany, Asia, and Canada.
Extinction Rebellion is a UK-based environmental movement, generally using nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to what members perceive as global warming and ecological collapse.
