Fathers run London Marathon in memory of Southport attack victims

Sergio Aguiar and David Stancombe ran the London Marathon together with their daughters at the center of every mile, turning a 26.2-mile race into a public act of remembrance for Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7. On a warm marathon day that reached 22.2C and drew more than 56,000 expected participants, the two fathers said their girls would be with them in spirit, and the effort became as much about solidarity as endurance.

The race carried the weight of the Southport attack on 29 July 2024, in which Alice, Elsie and Bebe King, 6, were killed at the dance studio at The Hart Space. The killings remained a defining part of the national conversation into 2025 after Axel Rudakubana was sentenced in January to 52 years in prison. The judge said a whole-life order could not be imposed because he was nine days short of his 18th birthday when the murders were carried out.

For Aguiar and Stancombe, the marathon was tied directly to a memorial fundraising drive for Churchtown Primary School in Southport, where Alice and Bebe were pupils. The appeal had already passed £200,000 by 15 March 2025 and was aiming for £250,000 after Sergio Aguiar’s appearance on BBC Breakfast helped widen support. The school’s planned playground was designed to do more than offer a place to play. It was described as including a dedicated performance space, an indoor and outdoor library, and a trim trail track, a layout intended to give children room for reading, movement and expression.

Jinnie Payne, the school leader, called the project “a hope for the future”, and that sense of forward motion helped shape the public response to the fathers’ run. The fundraising drive gave the Southport community a way to carry memory into something tangible, linking the girls’ names to a place where children could gather, perform and learn together.

That effort went on to help underpin major memorial projects in the girls’ names, and in December 2025 Aguiar and Stancombe received the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Helen Rollason Award for their work. What began as a marathon became a lasting civic ritual, one that turned private loss into shared endurance and a wider support network for a town still living with what was taken from it.