Jeroen Ensink's widow Nadja 'will show their daughter the world as he wanted to'

Just 11 days after their child was born, Nadja Ensink-Teich’s husband was killed on his doorstep. She tells Susannah Butter about the remarkable man she loved
Nadja Ensink-Teich
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

The last words I said to him were ‘don’t go out now, we can do it later together’.” Nadja Ensink–Teich is recalling December 29 last year. She and her husband, the academic Jeroen Ensink, had spent a quiet, happy Christmas together, adjusting to life with their newborn baby.

Fleur was 11 days old when Jeroen, aged 41, left their house in Tufnell Park at 1.45pm to post cards announcing her birth to friends.

“Jeroen was the proudest father and wanted to make sure that the cards we had designed together would be sent off before the New Year. He wanted to share our happiness with the world.” As he walked to the post box, Jeroen was attacked with a knife by a stranger. He died at 1.50pm.

Nadja, aged 37, says: “It still feels like yesterday. There was a knock on the door, three police officers standing there, and you just know. It’s like the worst movie. You want to switch channels but you can’t. Your life collapses. We didn’t even have a chance to get used to being a family. We had 11 days together. We went out for one walk as a family, the three of us. That’s all we got.”

This Monday, Femi Tinchang Nandap, aged 23, was sentenced to a hospital order for stabbing Jeroen. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Nandap was suffering psychosis at the time of the killing and had been arrested seven months previously for allegedly possessing a knife and assaulting a police officer. Those charges were dropped six days before Jeroen was killed.

Now, Nadja is calling for an independent investigation into the circumstances that led to her husband’s death and measures to make sure people with mental health issues don’t, as she puts it, “fall through the cracks in the system”.

She was at the Old Bailey for the sentencing hearing this week and we meet at her friend’s house in Wanstead while Fleur sleeps upstairs to talk about Jeroen, pronounced Yurron (“it annoyed him that no one could pronounce it”), an adventurous man who “was everyone’s friend” and devoted his life to improving clean water access and sanitation “because he was practical and wanted to find solutions to social injustice”.

The couple lived in what Nadja describes as “an affluent, up-and-coming area where we always felt safe”. “It could have happened anywhere, to anyone. We are not a one-off. A lot of the time families of people with mental illnesses ask for help and are not given it. All the cuts to services mean there are more tragedies waiting to happen and it needs to be taken seriously. If [Nandap] had been on medication this probably wouldn’t have happened.”

Nadja, an events manager, met Jeroen on Guardian Soulmates in 2010. “There was an instant sense that he was the one. Jeroen had a twinkle in his eye, a love of life radiating off him that shone through in the nice picture of him on his profile. It showed him at work by a river in Pakistan. I thought ‘that’s an adventurous man’.” He started the conversation, they discovered they were both Dutch, and they wasted no time in arranging a date.

Nadja Ensink, with her husband Dr Jeroen Ensink, on holiday in Egmond aan Zee in the Netherlands last August while 5 months pregnant
PA

Jeroen waited for Nadja outside Liberty’s department store. They had a beer, watched Germany playing Ghana in the World Cup and went to a Dutch bar. “If you are two foreigners living in London you have an instant link. Afterwards I told everyone I’d met the love of my life.”

Six months into their relationship, Jeroen took Nadja with him on a work trip to Tanzania. “It was our first holiday together and we sampled pit latrines,” she deadpans. “We combined it with a trip to Zanzibar. Jeroen was at home anywhere in the world.”

He proposed the following year back in Zanzibar and they were married in Holland. “He hadn’t planned the proposal. It was just the perfect moment — we knew we wanted to share the rest of our lives together. We completed each other, complemented each other.”

Jeroen was born in the Dutch countryside. He lived in Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka before coming to do a PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2002, becoming senior lecturer in public health engineering there.

“Jeroen was his work,” says Nadja. “I never thought I’d end up with an expert in water and sanitation but I know quite a bit about that now. He believed in the goodness of the world and worked so hard to make it a better place. Instead of talking about injustice, he did something.” The only time he shouted was when he was watching football. He supported Fulham and played in his work team.

Before Jeroen met Nadja he was in a plane coming back from Beijing that had to make a crash landing at Heathrow in 2008. “Ever since then he was anxious about landing and taking off but didn’t have a choice because of his job.”

At the time of his death, Jeroen was leading a large study in the Democratic Republic of Congo to understand how improvements in water supply and other measures could control and prevent cholera outbreaks. All his projects will continue and the school and Nadja have set up the Jeroen Ensink Memorial Fund, for MSc scholarships for students from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. They have already raised more than £80,000.

“Jeroen was his work,” says Nadja
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

Jeroen also felt strongly about mental health. “He thought people should get the treatment they need. He felt strongly about knife crime as well and saw it all in the context of social injustice.”

He and Nadja bought their Tufnell Park house in 2012. “Every Sunday we got up early and went for a walk in Hampstead Heath. We talked about how we’d love to have a dog. We enjoyed being in nature and enjoying what the world has to offer.” When he went away without Nadja he’d always bring her back a present: “He’d never come back from Holland without a huge bunch of flowers.”

Between work and travelling, Nadja says: “We had a good life, we had everything we wanted. Our daughter was the icing on the cake. She was very wanted. I miss the children we are not going to have.

“When you see the man you love holding your daughter he takes on a whole new dimension. Jeroen was tall and Fleur looked tiny in his arms. There’s a massive responsibility for this tiny bundle.”

Nadja says her husband's death still feels like yesterday 
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

They chose the name Fleur because it works in three languages and they wanted to travel with her, starting with a trip to a conference in Malawi that Jeroen was speaking at in May. “We had it all planned out. We wanted to continue our life travelling with Fleur. I’ll do my best to continue showing her the world, as Jeroen wanted.”

She continues: “I’m dreading the day that Fleur asks why she doesn’t have a father and I have to explain what happened. But she’ll get that in bitesize nuggets whenever she’s ready. I don’t know how I’ll do it, I’m not there yet. I’m still going day by day. I hope that the independent investigation will provide the answers that I need to give to Fleur when she’s older.”

In June, Nadja moved back to live with her parents in the Netherlands. “I couldn’t live in London any more. You walk out the front door and that’s where he was murdered. Time will tell if I could live here again. I can’t make it go away, as much as I want to.”

Fleur gives Nadja the strength to carry on. “You need to get out of bed in the morning to feed and change her. Putting a pillow over your head is not an option and it’s not the person I am anyway.”

Fleur looks like her father and already loves to read, just like him. Nadja speaks about him all the time and has pictures of him everywhere. “She has a sense of him. The background on my phone is a picture of the two of us, which she kisses. I am collecting everything I can get my hands on about Jeroen for Fleur. She will always know what a remarkable father she had. I miss him every second of the day. I want his legacy to go on.”

She continues: “Jeroen lived a life of love, not hate. From the first moment this happened I said I don’t want to become hard and bitter, it will only stop me being the mum I want to be. I want to continue and show Fleur the beauty of the world.”

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