A friend of Christina Rowe said that the model's family warned her to be careful around her mentally unstable ex-boyfriend before he stabbed her to death.
The model was allegedly killed by Charles Byrne, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, last year because he thought she was a "reskinned male paedophile," a court was told. Byrne, 25, also tried to kill Rowe's daughter, who survived after she pretended to be dead.
Rowe's friend George Devereux from Worcester, England, told Mirror that he "warned her about him and so did her family." He said that it was a difficult one because they "didn't know the extent of everything," and that they "didn't know about him stalking or kidnapping them." He added, "I don't think they were together when I gave her a friendly warning to be careful around him, but they were still talking." He was concerned for his friend, and noted that her boyfriend was "behaving erratically and was quite aggressive and controlling."
Rowe and her daughter came to stay with her friend for a bit and he later found out that her boyfriend "would turn up at her home in the middle of the night." Devereux said that Rowe's sister told him that Byrne "kidnapped" his ex-girlfriend and her daughter a couple of days before she was fatally stabbed. Although Byrne was not convicted of kidnap, it is claimed the mother-daughter duo were held for a few hours against their will.
Last month, after admitting the manslaughter of Rowe by diminished responsibility and the attempted murder of her child, Byrne was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 16 years by a judge at Worcester Crown Court, reported Daily Mail.
Her death continues to haunt Devereux, who agrees with the life sentence given to Byrne. He said that her death still keeps him up at "night, thinking about it," and shared that it's "going to haunt me for a while."
He recalled reading an article which said that that a psychiatrist called Byrne a "kind man," and the "whole reason he did it was because of mental illness." Devereux said that one way he's rationalized it in his head is "comparing it to if someone drink drives and kills someone, they are at fault but it's different to if they planned something before." But he noted that mental illness or not, there are "certain actions that have to be punished." According to him, 16 years is a fair sentence, and he thinks "it's good he's in a mental hospital now and that he will be transferred to prison."
Byrne put Rowe's body in a suitcase after killing her in February 2021 and then he dumped it in the River Severn.
