Two men have been jailed for life for the murder of footballer Cody Fisher in a nightclub attack in Birmingham on Boxing Day 2022.
Remy Gordon, 23, and Kami Carpenter, 22, had blamed each other for stabbing the 23-year-old former Birmingham City academy player, who died at the scene from a chest wound.
During a two-month trial, the jury heard that Fisher was attacked with a weapon smuggled through security into the Crane nightclub in Digbeth as part of a planned “act of retribution” for a minor incident two days earlier.
Jurors at Birmingham crown court were told Gordon orchestrated the “awful revenge” after Fisher accidentally bumped into him while leaving Popworld in Solihull on Christmas Eve, during which the pair exchanged a few words.
Gordon then set about trying to identify Fisher from social media images he found of him on other nights out and, after learning his name, found that he was likely to be at the Crane nightclub on Boxing Day.
Inside the club, shortly before midnight on Boxing Day, Cody was surrounded before being head-butted, punched and kicked. He was stabbed once in the chest and died from the wound at the scene.
On Monday, Judge Paul Farrer KC jailed Gordon and Carpenter, of Kings Norton, for a minimum of 26 and 25 years respectively.
In a statement read out in court, Fisher’s girlfriend, Jessica Chatwin, who was with him the night he was killed, said her world “shattered” as her boyfriend took his last breaths in her arms.
She said: “Seconds before that moment I remember turning around and looking at Cody behind me and he gave me the biggest smile full of love and happiness – now I question if that was his goodbye.
“The next time I turned around he was surrounded by those attacking him and I watched him fall to the floor, then reality struck that he had been fatally stabbed.
“My life stopped that day. I live each day with enormous pain, loneliness and sadness. I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with Cody. Now I have to face the world without his love and guidance, something he always showed me while we were together.
“He was my strength in every situation and now I have to face it all alone.”
A statement from Fisher’s mother, Tracey, who did not enter the courtroom but was in the building during the sentencing hearing, was also read out in which she said it was “too much for a mother to bear” to hear the defendants’ “abhorrent lies”.
Paying tribute to her son, the statement said: “Since this horrendous day I feel that my own life has ended. It is as though I too was stabbed straight through the heart.
“I have seen myself go from the happiest, outgoing person, to fighting the hell out of just getting through each and every horrendous, never-ending day in the abhorrent knowledge that my youngest son, my best friend, is never coming home to sleep in his bedroom, the room that I still cannot enter even to this day.”
The Crane had its licence permanently revoked a month after the murder, with police saying there was an “inadequate search regime” at the club and “blatant and widespread” use of drugs.