As her son lay dying in her arms, Shari-Ann Selvey rubbed his neck, kissed his head and begged him to “come back.”Moments earlier, she’d nearly pulled 14-year-old Devan to safety. This is Selvey’s recollection of events; police have not discussed these details of the case.“I was almost grabbing Devan’s arm to get him in the car,” Selvey recalled three weeks after the Oct. 7 attack that claimed her son’s life.She had been trying in vain to get the Grade 9 student away from the kids chasing him — all part of a group who’d allegedly just pepper-sprayed a friend and who’d long bullied Devan — and away from a girl taunting him to hit her. He stopped running, standing just behind Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School, to address the girl. “I can’t hit you, I was raised better than that,” he told the girl, Selvey recalls.Then “everything went to hell,” she said.A boy came up from behind Selvey, running toward her son. She alleges that he stabbed her son in the back with a knife just once. It was enough to kill him.“How cowardly can you be?” she said. “Devan didn’t have an opportunity to fight back. He didn’t even have an opportunity to face the kid, have a conversation with him.”“Why didn’t he stab me and not Devan?”The incident, which unfolded in Hamilton’s east end, is now widely known across Canada. Locally, it sparked conversations about bullying, its causes, and how schools can stop it.But Selvey’s account of what happened that day has remained untold.Shari-Ann Selvey is speaking out now because she wants justice for her son. She’s channelling her anger into anything that she thinks will help prevent a similar incident from happening to another family, including sharing her story.Thinking back to that cloudy October Monday, Selvey remembers driving to court with plans to file a civil lawsuit ...
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