Gloria Taylor’s death certificate may state that she died from a heart attack, but the people of Peckham do not believe it.

They are sure that when Mrs Taylor, the mother of the murdered school boy, Damilola, collapsed on the pavement on Tuesday evening, it was from a broken heart.

“She could not recover from the loss of her son,” said Sebastian Macksoni, 49, a long-term resident of the crime-ridden South London borough. “A death of any kind is hard to swallow, but he was completely innocent.”

According to Scotland Yard, Mrs Taylor was walking with her husband, Richard, 59, in Shooter’s Hill, South London, when she suffered a suspected heart attack. The emergency services were called at about 7.45pm and she was taken to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead 45 minutes later. Mrs Taylor was only 57.

Eight years earlier in November 2000, her ten-year-old son Damilola, suffered a similarly unexpected death when he was stabbed with a broken beer bottle by two children, aged 12 and 13.

The Taylor family had moved to England from Nigeria less than six months before and Damilola’s death came to symbolise the growing problem of youth crime in inner cities.

Mrs Taylor became a dedicated campaigner on the issue. In 2001, on the first anniversary of her son’s murder, she and her husband launched the Damilola Taylor Trust to provide “hope, life and opportunity for Britain’s downtrodden and underprivileged youth”.

The news of Mrs Taylor’s death was slow to spread in Peckham yesterday. There were no flower tributes or cards. But in Peckham Library, where Damilola spent his last hours, Sarah Johnson, 42, was visibly shaken.

“I’m so upset to hear she has died. I can only think that it was from a broken heart,” she said. “I’m a mother myself and I don’t think I could ever get over losing a child, especially in that awful way.”

On the library’s noticeboard, among the adverts for book groups, sales and helplines, was one for a play: Death Never Used to Be for the Young. Another library user, who gave his name as “Concerned”, spoke of “the constant pressure [Mrs Taylor] was under all the time from the media and the court case”.

Danny and Ricky Preddie, now aged 20 and 21, were finally convicted of Damilola’s manslaughter in 2006, but only after six years, three trials and a bungled police investigation.

In Blakes Road, where Damilola bled to death in a stairwell only 200 yards from his home, 11-year-old Deso-na Odumosu and 14-year-old Ifeoma Ahima still remembered seeing Damilola playing on their street.

“I used to see him around all the time,” said Ifeoma. “When he was killed, it made me feel sick.

Nick Stanton, the leader of South-wark Council, praised Mrs Taylor for being a “remarkable woman who displayed incredible dignity and courage in the face of tragedy”.

Sir Trevor MacDonald, the chief patron of the Damilola Taylor Trust, told The Times: “Gloria Taylor bore the sad loss of her son with enormous dignity and was determined that he should not have died in vain and channelled all her energies into making her community a better place.”

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