Milton Keynes shooting: Firearms officer feared for toddler's life before Kelvin Igweani shot dead

A firearms officer told an inquest he feared for the life of a two-year-old boy who was being beaten by a man subsequently shot dead by police.

Kelvin Igweani, 24, was shot four times by another officer after barricading himself and the boy in a flat where a neighbour was bludgeoned to death with a kettlebell as he tried to save the child.

Richard Woodcock, 38, had gone to rescue the boy but was pulled inside the property in Milton Keynes and beaten around the head with a 4kg weight.

On the second day of the inquest, a police firearms officer told the jury he had tried to Taser Mr Igweani when he and and a colleague got into the flat in Denmead in June 2021.

However, the weapon did not have the full effect and Mr Igweani then barricaded himself in a bedroom with the child.

“Prior to entering the flat I heard the child crying and again whilst we were outside the bedroom door," said the officer, who can only be referred to as R14.

“My concern was that Mr Igweani was going to kill the child.”

Police could see the body of Mr Woodcock inside the flat.

R14 said: “I could hear the child crying and could hear Mr Igweani shouting but couldn’t make out what he was saying. I heard repeated banging and the child stopped crying and I believed that Mr Igweani was assaulting the child.”

When police got into the bedroom, R14 said he could see Mr Igweani hitting the child and shortly after that he heard shots fired.

He then went to get the child out of the room and Mr Igweani tried to grab him. At that point, R14 said, he struck him in the face.

When asked by the family’s barrister Stephen Simblet QC why, with five or six officers on the scene, they did not try to reason with Mr Igweani, R14 said: “One of my thoughts would have been to contain and negotiate had he been on his own but my focus was solely on the child when we entered the flat.”

And when asked if he knew his fellow firearms officer R60 was going to fire his gun R14 replied: “No.”

The child was taken away by an ambulance and survived.

They tried to administer first aid but Mr Igweani died at the scene.

The officer who fired the shots, R60, was questioned about his later claim recorded on body cam footage that Mr Igweani “charged at them with a knife”.

When asked about the fact that the footage did not show that, R60 said: “That’s the words I used, yes. That’s the words I used under a very stressful situation.

“I believed at the time we went through the front door he was in possession of a knife and came at us with a knife.”

R60 was also asked by the family’s barrister Stephen Simblet QC about whether he had “lost control”.

He replied: “That’s incorrect."

On the first day of the inquest, the jury was told that police had shot Mr Igweani four times, Tasered him twice, and punched him several times in an attempt to incapacitate him.

They were shown harrowing footage from police body-worn cameras of the stand-off and shooting.

An inquest into the death of Mr Woodcock found he had been unlawfully killed. The coroner at the time said his "heroic actions" had saved the life of the boy.

The inquest into Mr Igweani's death continues.

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