Two men have been jailed for life for the murder of footballer Cody Fisher, who was stabbed to death inside a Birmingham nightclub on Boxing Day in 2022. Remy Gordon, 23, and Kami Carpenter, 22, had blamed each other for stabbing the 23-year-old former Birmingham City academy player, who died at the scene from a chest wound.
However, both were found guilty of his murder last month while a third defendant, Reegan Anderson, 19, was cleared. Gordon and Anderson were also found guilty of affray in relation to a “targeted” attack on a friend of Mr Fisher’s immediately after the stabbing, which saw him chased across the dancefloor and kicked as he lay “defenceless” on the ground.
A 10-week trial was told Mr Fisher was attacked with a weapon smuggled through security into Digbeth’s Crane nightclub before a pre-planned “act of retribution” for a minor incident two days earlier. Jurors at Birmingham Crown Court were told Gordon, of Cofton Park Drive, Birmingham, orchestrated the “awful revenge” after Mr Fisher made brief “unavoidable” contact with his back while leaving a packed club in Solihull on Christmas Eve
On Monday, Judge Paul Farrer KC jailed Gordon and Carpenter, of Owens Croft, Kings Norton, for a minimum of 26 and 25 years respectively on Monday. In a statement read out in court, Mr Fisher’s girlfriend Jessica Chatwin, who was with him the night he was killed, said her world “shattered” as her boyfriend took his last breaths in her arms.
She said: “Seconds before that moment I remember turning around and looking at Cody behind me and he gave me the biggest smile full of love and happiness – now I question if that was his goodbye. The next time I turned around he was surrounded by those attacking him and I watched him fall to the floor, then reality struck that he had been fatally stabbed.
“My life stopped that day, I live each day with enormous pain, loneliness and sadness. I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with Cody. Now I have to face the world without his love and guidance, something he always showed me while we were together. He was my strength in every situation and now I have to face it all alone.”
It was also read aloud a statement made by Mr Fisher’s mother Tracey, who was present in the premises but did not enter the courtroom during the sentence hearing, in which she stated that hearing the defendants’ “abhorrent lies” was “too much for a mother to bear.”
In a eulogy to her son, she said, “Since this terrible day, I feel as though my own life has ended; it’s as if I was also stabbed through the heart straight.” I’ve watched myself go from being the happiest, most gregarious person to struggling to get through every terrible, never-ending day while living with the horrible knowing that my dearest buddy, my youngest son, will never sleep in his bedroom at home.I s
till cannot enter even to this day.
Since Cody was a small child, I have taught him to stand up for himself and not allow others to bully him. I informed him that depressed, weak people really exist in our culture and that they wreck lives; it is ironic and heartbreaking because Cody’s story completely matches this description. You never expect your child to be murdered, and that’s something I consider every day, but he was only following his mother’s instructions.
