A MAN who stabbed a 23-year-old to death before calmly ordering a pizza and phoning the police has been jailed for life.

A MAN who stabbed a 23-year-old to death before calmly ordering a pizza and phoning the police has been jailed for life.

Just minutes after Andrew Rowlands fatally wounded Lewis Watson he walked into a fast-food shop, ordered a pizza and borrowed a mobile phone to tell police what he had done, according to a witness.

Rowlands, 27, of The Croft, Sudbury, was sentenced at Ipswich Crown Court this afternoon after admitting murder at an earlier hearing. He will serve a minimum of 17 years before being considered for parole.

Emergency services were called to Cavendish Way in Sudbury at 12.16am on Saturday, September 26 last year after Mr Watson, of Rubens Road, Sudbury, sustained fatal stab wounds.

He was taken to the West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds but died an hour later.

A kebab shop owner said Rowlands came into his premises with blood trickling down his face from a cut on his eye.

He then walked outside the shop in Gaol Lane and asked to use a man's mobile phone before calling the police himself.

A couple of minutes later police arrived and arrested him.

“I was shocked to see it happen,” said the business owner, who asked not to be named. “I thought he was joking with the police.

“He got arrested at the front of my shop. He came in and bought a pizza. He had a cut open eye and just acted normal.

“He phoned the police by himself and handed himself in. He asked for a phone outside and someone gave him a phone.”

The takeaway owner said he had “stood calmly” while waiting for his pizza, before customers looked on in horror as he told the police what had happened just minutes earlier.

Asked what sentence he believed Rowlands should get, the takeaway owner said: “He should be given two life sentences, not one, for what he did. A young boy died for nothing.”

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