A 42 year old man who murdered a 17 year-old teenager in a race related attack, has been sentenced to 22 years in jail.
Lee Dent stabbed promising footballer Alex Peguero Sosa, with a broken bottle as they stood outside a taxi rank in Devon last July.
Leaving the scene he dumped his bloodied clothes into a recycle bin, and later told his friend that “the n***** deserved it.”
“It was an act of pure aggression from the defendant,” prosecutor Simon Laws said at Plymouth Crown Court.
“It was a situation he could have walked away from at any point. Instead, he chose to resort to violence of an extreme kind and a young life was wasted as a result.”
During trial, Dent insisted that he was not a racist, claiming that he had black, Asian and Muslim friends, and said that his use of racist language was ‘in the heat of the moment’.
The murdered 17 year-old Sosa had just finished his first year in college when he was murdered. He also played for Plymouth Argyle youth squad.
