A 17 year old boy was convicted of the murder of Kentish Town teenager Lewis Blackman yesterday.

The killer, who cannot be named due to his age, was found guilty of stabbing Mr Blackman, 19, as part of a “wild pack of teens” who inflicted fourteen knife wounds in a matter of moments.

Mr Blackman, a former pupil of Acland Burghley School, died shortly after being chased from a house party he and a group of friends had crashed in Earl’s Court in the early hours of February 18 2018.

The defendant’s barrister Mr James Wood QC had argued that teenager had not meant to kill Mr Blackman, sometimes known as ‘Dotz’ or ‘Dotty’, and had not even known whether or not he had made contact with the victim when he “stabbed out” with a knife following a 70m chase.

But the jury took under a day of deliberation to reject this account of the crime and find the teenage defendant, who suffered a stab wound to his arm himself on the night in question, guilty.

During the trial the court heard from a pathologist who testified that a stab wound inflicted by the defendant “tracked through the skin, fat and muscle of the back before reaching the aorta” and that this injury alone would have killed him.

Summing up his case last week, prosecutor Mr Tom Little QC told the jury: “You know that when the aorta was cut through the back with a knife, the loss of blood supply meant it was only a matter of time before he would collapse and die.”

Blackman and a group of friends from Camden had not been invited to the party, held in an an AirBnB property on Earl’s Court Road to celebrate a girl’s 16th birthday, but they attended anyway.

They were only inside the party for a minute, but an altercation saw them quickly leave the property before being chased by a group of boys who had been there to begin with, including the defendant, who led the chase.

Late last year two other teenagers were convicted of Lewis Blackman’s murder and a third of his manslaughter. It is expected that all four boys will be sentenced on February 28.