British teenager who killed family and planned school massacre gets minimum 49 years in prison

Undated handout screengrab issued by Bedfordshire Police of of teenager Nicholas Prosper holding a plank of wood as a mock gun, pretending to shoot people. (Bedfordshire Police/PA via AP)

LONDON — A 19-year-old British man who shot and killed his mother and two younger siblings and who wanted to carry out a high-profile school shooting was told Wednesday he will not be eligible for parole for at least 49 years.

At the sentencing hearing at Luton Crown Court, Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said she had considered handing Nicholas Prosper a full life sentence in prison but opted against that given his age -- he was 18 at the time of the shootings -- and the fact that he had pleaded guilty,

Last month, Prosper admitted at a hearing to murdering his mother Juliana Falcon, 48, and his 13-year-old sister Giselle Prosper and 16-year-old brother Kyle Prosper at the apartment the family shared in Luton, Bedfordshire, on Sept. 13. He had also stabbed his brother more than 100 times.

The judge said Prosper had wanted to emulate and outdo atrocities around the world, including the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in Dec. 2012, when 26 people, mostly children were killed, and the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 when 30 people were killed.

“Your ambition was notoriety,” she told Prosper, who had to be forced to come to the court to hear his fate. “You wanted to be known posthumously as the world’s most famous school shooter of the 21st century.”

The judge said Prosper’s case featured many “recurrent themes” seen in school shootings around the world, including a sexual interest in children, a withdrawal into an online world, a lack of empathy towards victims and the selection of a “uniform” for the killings.

The court was told that Prosper, who had been unable to stay in education or hold down a job, had been planning the attack on his family and his old elementary school on Friday the 13th -- the date was no accident, with Prosper thinking it would give him even more notoriety.

He managed to forge a gun license and used it to buy a shotgun and 100 cartridges from a legitimate firearms dealer the day before the murders.

Prosper had intended to kill his family in their sleep but his mother had woken up, and after realizing something was “terribly wrong,” a struggle ensued. After shooting his mother, Prosper left a copy of the novel “How to Kill Your Family” on her legs, before shooting his sister as she hid under a table, and then stabbing and shooting his brother.

“The lives of your own mother and younger brother and sister were to be collateral damage on the way to fulfil your ambition,” the judge said.

She added that Prosper appeared “cheerful” and had blood on his hands, clothes and glasses when he was picked up by police in a nearby street after the attack had been reported by a neighbour.

Bedfordshire Police Detective Superintendent Rob Hall read a statement on behalf of Prosper’s father Raymond Prosper, in which he said the deaths of his ex-partner Juliana and his son Kyle and daughter Giselle, had “much more meaning and importance.”

“Their deaths and the fast response of Bedfordshire Police stopped any other family in the community going through the pain we have suffered,” he said.

Pan Pylas, The Associated Press