A hotel worker killed by an asylum seeker had ‘courage, compassion and a heart of gold’, her mother has said.
Rhiannon Whyte, 27, was stabbed 23 times in the head and chest with a screwdriver by Sudanese migrant Deng Chol Majek after she left work at the Park Inn Hotel in Walsall in October 2024.
Her mother Siobhan has said she is still ‘wrapped up in my own guilt and grief’ and refuses to to even refer to her killer by name.
Majek was sentenced to life in prison wit a minimum term of 29 years at Coventry Crown Court after being incriminated by ‘overwhelming’ evidence including CCTV footage and DNA analysis.
Ms Whyte, the mother to a six-year-old boy, was ‘smart, kind and funny, with the gentlest, purest heart’, Siobhan said.
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She told Daily Mail that Majek had ‘remorse, no conscience and has taken no responsibility for his actions’.
Footage showed Majek stopping to look at Ms Whyte as she was finishing her shift behind the bar at the hotel, where she had worked for three months.
He then followed her as she walked to Bescott Stadium railway station to catch her train home before stabbing her on the platform.
Ms Whyte’s friend called British Transport Police who managed to arrest Majek, who had since returned to the hotel, within five hours.
The hotel worker was taken to hospital and was pronounced dead three days later.
CCTV footage then showed the moment Majek threw Ms Whyte’s phone in the River Tome as a call flashed up from mother Siobhan.
While Ms Whyte was lying unconscious in the ICU, Majek was seen dancing at the hotel having purchased beer at a local off-licence.
Siobhan has also grappled with the trauma of explaining to her six-year-old grandson, who lives with his aunt Alex, his mum won’t be coming back.
She said they had simply told him a ‘bad man hurt her brain and the doctors couldn’t make it better’, but that he would learn the truth when he was older.
The grieving mother added she had showed Majek ‘no disrespect’ in court, but that he had only looked her in the eye once.
‘He genuinely did not care. He made eye contact with me once, then he looked away. He just stood there looking dead behind the eyes’, she said.
Gurdeep Garcha KC, defending Majek, suggested he could have been mistaken for someone else, pointing to Walsall’s multicultural community – at which point Siobhan said she had to step out of court.
Asked about her views on migration, Siobhan said the government needed to take ‘its head out of the sand’ and do more to properly vet undocumented migrants.
But the senior health care worker said her family wouldn’t judge anyone by the colour of their skin, adding that she worked alongside several immigrants, all of whom are legally in the UK and are ‘lovely women’.
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