RHYS JONES’S regular seat in the top balcony at Goodison Park was left poignantly empty yesterday. It was where the 11-year-old should have been, watching and roaring his lungs out in support of his beloved Everton.

Gloom hung over the football ground as it prepared for the early evening game against Blackburn Rovers. The 33,000 fans rose to their feet as one to clap in a minute’s applause to honour the life of the young supporter.

His parents had wanted applause, not the traditional silence. Their son was as noisy as any 11-year-old should be.

Melanie Jones, Rhys’s mother, wiped away the tears as she stood alongside her husband Steve, and their eldest son Owen, 17, as the applause rang around the stadium.

Rhys was the latest child to be caught up in the misery of Britain’s gang warfare. Until fate intervened so tragically he had everything to look forward to, and most immediately he was looking forward to yesterday’s match.

Liverpool sometimes seems to be made for grief. It has lived through some terrible times over the past 30 years: the Toxteth riots, the tragedies of Hillsbor-ough and Heysel and the horrific murder of James Bulger. The Bulger case was used to suggest that there was a big problem in British society, but then filed away as something totally abnormal.

Rhys’s death, too, has brought Liverpool face to face with the sinister new cultural phenomenon of modern Britain, where youngsters feel empowered to shoot each other on a whim and are proud of it. It was only a fortnight ago that Everton fans were playing their part in the international search for Madeleine McCann. The players wore T-shirts with her photograph and the message: “Don’t you forget about me.” Her mother Kate, 39, is from Liverpool and is a lifelong Everton supporter.

Pictures released of both Rhys and Madeleine show them in Everton shirts. Goodison Park has held tributes to half-a-dozen young Everton supporters killed in Iraq. It is a family club.

But the difference on this occasion is that those killed in Iraq were adults, in the military, trained to fight and kill in the name of their country.

Last Wednesday’s victim, by contrast, was an innocent boy who did not know gunfire until he was shot in the neck by a hooded BMX-riding teenager. He had been at a training session for the Fir Tree pub’s under11s soccer team. Yesterday it was considering disbanding, unable to complete the season’s fixtures without him.

Rhys had nothing to do with the gangs that have been competing for power in the rough estates bordering Croxteth Park. His parents are adamant that he rejected them totally.

“It is just too sad to talk about,” said one old woman in Kate’s, a fruit and vegetable store. Across the road at the Lobster Arms, four young boys of similar age to Rhys were smashing a can of Coca-Cola against a brick wall.

“Bang bang! You’re dead,” they laughed, pointing their fingers like a gun. But they, too, seemed shocked by the murder. “The killer should hang,” they chorused.

In years of war reporting I have been repeatedly confronted by death and tragedy and no matter how much it happens it is always depressing. The terms one often uses to describe violent death are futile or senseless. They certainly apply here.

Perhaps it is understandable for the youngsters in war-torn Iraq to be hardened by the violence and to be impressed by carrying firearms. Many do. Guns are all they have known over the past four years of their wretched and underprivileged lives.

But why here? “Perhaps it is something cultural in the way we bring up our children,” said a Croxteth man.

As they watched yesterday’s match and mourned their son, his grieving parents were desperate for the killer to be caught and for answers to that question, too.

Elsewhere on Merseyside, five classmates of Rhys have set up a website called Loving Memory of Rhys. It is full of photographs of them with him and messages to him.

The boys from Broad Square primary school say in their introduction to the site: “The gang people have websites to show how bad they are; we wanted to do a site for Rhys to show how GOOD he was.”

There are touching details about the dead boy’s life from those who knew him best. They describe how he was the person to talk to if his school friends felt down and how he would lend them money for the tuck shop.

One farewell message reads: “Rhys, every goal I score will be for you and every time I do something good I will look up to the sky for you.”

Yesterday Liverpool city centre was bustling with Beatles fans arriving for a three-day festival to commemorate the seminal pop band. It is an export the city wants to be known for, not the senseless violence.

Liverpool is to be the European capital of culture in 2008. It is the best prize a European city can win after the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games. “It is tragic that Rhys will not be alive then,” said a neighbour.

In the cruel roulette of life, the Croxteth youngster is an especially tragic loser.

Rhys's classmates have set up a tribute to him here

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