LONDON: A UK teenager who killed three family members and planned to outdo notorious US massacres to become “the world’s most famous school shooter of the 21st century” was on Wednesday jailed for a minimum of 49 years.

Nicholas Prosper, 18 at the time of the killings, used a shotgun to kill his mother Juliana Falcon, 48, sister Giselle, 13, and brother Kyle, 16, who also received more than 100 knife wounds, at their home in Luton, north of London, in Sept 2024.

“Your ambition was notoriety. You wanted to be known posthumously as the world’s most famous school shooter of the 21st century,” judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said on Wednesday as she sentenced the now 19-year-old.

Prosper told police upon his arrest of his “Friday the 13th” plan to also kill several four- and five-year-old pupils and two teachers at a nearby primary school that he had previously attended, then himself. He said his aim was to conduct an attack more deadly than the US Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech massacres, but that the plan was interrupted when his mother woke up before he could kill his family in their sleep.

The noisy struggle alerted neighbours, who called the police. After killing her he placed a novel with the title “How to Kill your Family” on her body. “You explicitly sought to emulate and outdo Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old American who shot dead 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut in 2012,” the judge said.

“You aimed for 34 deaths, one more than the deadliest school shooting of recent times in the United States of America, at Virginia Tech in 2007,” she added.

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2025