Drug dealer jailed for life for Strawberry Hill station stabbing over £50 MDMA deal
Dino Donaldson, 22, was sentenced to life with a minimum of 23 years for murdering student Anojan Gnaneswaran at Twickenham's Strawberry Hill station.
Drug dealer sentenced to life for fatal stabbing at Strawberry Hill station
A drug dealer who chased a university student onto railway tracks and stabbed him to death over a £50 dispute has been jailed for life, the Evening Standard reports.
Dino Donaldson, 22, was sentenced at the Old Bailey on Friday after being convicted of murdering Anojan Gnaneswaran, 21, at Strawberry Hill station in Twickenham on the evening of 3 April 2024.
The killing stemmed from a disagreement over 10 MDMA tablets worth approximately £50. Two groups of men met at the south-west London station that evening, and what began as a dispute rapidly turned violent. Donaldson armed himself with a knife and pursued Gnaneswaran onto the railway tracks, inflicting fatal stab wounds to his chest, abdomen and thigh. Emergency services pronounced the victim dead at the scene.
The attack was recorded on CCTV and witnessed by bystanders at the station.
Prosecutors told jurors that Donaldson displayed no remorse in the immediate aftermath. Within an hour of the killing, he was captured on CCTV laughing and smiling on a night bus. A doorbell camera recording later proved central to the prosecution case, in which Donaldson could be heard boasting about the attack.
"I stabbed him through the back bro, I stabbed him fully," he said in the recording. "I watched it and I felt it go in him, yeah."
British Transport Police launched an urgent manhunt following the killing. Officers traced Donaldson to his home several days later and found him hiding inside a cupboard. A search of his bedroom uncovered 74 wraps of crack cocaine and heroin with an estimated street value of more than £1,000.
British Transport Police had previously described the attack as a shocking act of violence in a public place. The station was forced to close while detectives and forensic officers conducted their investigation.
Friends and relatives of Gnaneswaran, an accounting student described as hardworking with a promising future, paid tribute following his death. His family issued a statement earlier in the proceedings expressing their devastation at losing a son in such sudden and brutal circumstances.
The judge, sentencing Donaldson to life on Friday, ordered that he serve a minimum of 23 years before being considered for release by the Parole Board — meaning he will remain behind bars until at least his mid-forties. The judge remarked that a young man's life had been cut short over a dispute of almost no value, leaving his family to bear the consequences for the rest of their lives.
Source: Evening Standard