``HE was my bodyguard.
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``All I have done is just sit outside for the last week, hoping that Josh will come home.''
Hobart mother Heidi El Ozone says she is living in a nightmare.
Last week her eldest son, Joshua Eric Newman, phoned to say he was moving to Launceston.
Two days later he was dead.
Mr Newman, 21, was murdered alongside Angela Maree Hallam, 31, in Ms Hallam's Housing Tasmania unit in Pioneer Parade, Ravenswood, on Wednesday August 15.
Both bodies had multiple stab wounds and had been set on fire.
Mrs El Ozone said viewing her son's body, after the coroner had finished his investigation, was ``the most horrific moment of my life''.
``To see him like that . . . I went and saw him because I had to kiss him goodbye one last time and I had to read him a letter from his brother, Ali,'' she said.
``The whole family is ripped apart,'' Mrs El Ozone said.
Mr Newman moved to Hobart from Sydney with his family in 2003.
Mrs El Ozone said she decided to make the move because she thought her children would be safer in the southern capital.
Now younger brother Ali and younger sisters Amira and Yasmine are struggling to adjust to life without their big brother and the family joker.
Family and friends from Sydney flew down for Mr Newman's funeral in Hobart on Wednesday, and last night Hobart's Islamic community paid tribute to him at a dinner hosted by his mosque.
Mrs El Ozone hoped people would remember her son for the person he was: a kind-hearted man with a dazzling smile.
``He could get anything he wanted out of you, just by batting his big brown eyes and his long eyelashes,'' she said.
She said Mr Newman had begun to sort his life out after a patch of ``normal teenage rebellion'', when he ``made me a grandmother way too young'' with the birth of son Jai in 2008.
``But I'm so glad he did now,'' she said. ``Jai is the spit out of Josh's mouth.''
Mr Newman was training as an apprentice chef at Hobart's Astor Grill when he abruptly decided to move to Launceston to be with Ms Hallam, who he had recently started seeing.
``He sent me a message last week saying: Mum, ring me, I'm at a crossroads,'' Mrs El Ozone said.
``He said: I've met this girl and she wants me to move to Launceston.
``And I said: You're still in the same state, what's the worst that could happen?
``And I saw him on Tuesday and I kissed him goodbye, and I told him I loved him and told him to stay safe.''
It was the last time Mrs El Ozone would speak to her son.
``I tried to ring Josh on Wednesday last week, and he didn't answer his phone, and he didn't ring back,'' she said.
``I heard the police report on the radio the next morning when I was driving my kids to school, and I thought, oh, maybe that's Josh.
``But I thought no, that's stupid.
``And then I got a message from a detective saying they had to speak to me about a `matter', and that's when I knew.''
Mrs El Ozone said Mr Newman, an amateur boxer with the Tasmanian Boxing Academy, had always stepped up to protect those around him, particularly women.
She said that the report from the coroner said he had defensive wounds, and she believed he had fought to protect Ms Hallam.
``I know from the coroner's report that he put up a hell of a fight,'' she said.
``No one deserves to die like that.
``Animals don't even do what they did to my boy.''
No one has been charged over the murder.
Detective Inspector Scott Flude, of Launceston CIB, said investigations into what he called one of the ``most shocking'' murders he had ever seen were continuing.
Mrs El Ozone just wants those that killed her son and Ms Hallam to be brought to justice.
``I want them to be prosecuted, and I want them to sit in a cell every day and think about what they took from me, because I can never get that back,'' she said.
Anyone with information about the murder can call Crime Stoppers anonymously on 1800 333 000 or police on 131 444.