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Notes -
Sure, normal people don’t murder strangers (or indeed anyone), every murderer is an extreme outlier by the very fact of their crime. This is true even for “violent assholes”.
But I don’t think this is an unprovoked random killing. I don’t think he sees this kid walking by himself from a distance and decides “I’m going to kill him”. The nature of the crime, the time, and the perpetrator don’t match that.
Where young men obsessed with weapons do just go out and use them (some school shooters, for example), they usually plan their “mission” extensively. They either go for huge impact / publicity / casualties and/or plot some kind of escape route (Digwa’s strategy was clearly thought out after the event). The same is true for most racially and/or religiously motivated attacks by angry young men.
To me by far the most plausible type explanation is that this was some young white ‘frat bro’ (the UK equivalent are probably these university sports teams) type who taunted Digwa (who probably had some racial prejudice given his immediate reaching for that excuse) and he reacted extremely violently, seeing it as a ‘just’ response. This lines up with eg Nowak filming the interaction (probably not out of fear), “what are you gonna do little guy, stab me?” style.
You can’t say things like this without people thinking you’re justifying the killing, which I’m most definitely not, but I find it extremely implausible this was a completely random (or random racially motivated, in that he picked a white guy at random) attack. The outrage is the police response, and maybe more broadly mass immigration in general (although the Southport murders were more impactful there).
I remember reading a satire article (which I'm unable to find now) where the title was something like "'What Are You Looking At?!' Says Man Who Has Been Trying to Get Your Attention for the Last Fifteen Minutes".
I routinely encounter ferociously angry and frustrated people like this who are clearly spoiling for a fight and actively looking for any pretext, no matter how feeble, to start a fight with someone smaller than them. My guess is that Nowak said something utterly innocuous that a more level-headed person would have responded to with good humour, but he had the poor fortune to pick the most mentally unstable young man in Southampton.
The quoted bit from the article/videos sounds like he essentially was telling Digwa, "What a right proper gangster you are, I bet you think you are such a naughty boy and all the bollocks". How innocuous you think that is up to you, but that would start shit across the pond in America if you said it to some inner-city wannabe gangster too.
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There's a lot of room between "completely random" and "accidentally provoked because the attacker required neglible provocation". Maybe Digwa was already in a seething rage for unrelated reasons, and some mild comment after bumping into a stranger (or just the bumping) set him off. My point is that the plausible, likely area of their potential interactions includes quite a bit of "Henry did literally nothing wrong".
If we were to tsk-tsk at Nowak, at some point we’d just be reinventing the “something must had triggered the pitbull’s reactivity” when a child got mauled or the “someone must had said the n-word” when a senior American citzen got bustled in the street, but for the Sikh edition when a white Brit got stabbed to death.
If one were to apply inebriation standards from other domains: to the extent Nowak had a few drinks, he was intoxicated and could not consent to the initial conversation with Digwa, much less the interaction that followed.
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