A blue tarpaulin hung across the front of the ground-floor council maisonette
in Clapham, South London, where 15-year-old Billy Cox was killed on
Valentine’s Day.
The police were out in force, scouring the surrounding ground for clues and
fending off journalists.
Throughout yesterday, sobbing teenage friends came to lay flowers just outside
the taped-off area. At 3.25pm, 24 hours after Billy was shot by unknown
assailants, his body was wheeled out on a trolley and taken away in an
ambulance.
Beyond the well-intentioned tributes and a photograph of a smiling, seemingly
charming lad, it was obvious that Billy was no angel. The police said that
he was under a supervision order for burglary, wore a tag, and was the
subject of a 7pm-7am curfew. Though he was enrolled at the Ernest Bevin
school in Wandsworth, he was referred a few weeks ago to another school in
Kennington for “challenging” and “troubled” young people.
He was known to his friends as “Remer” — the name appears on graffiti painted
on walls around the estate — and he was allegedly a member of a gang known
as the Clap Town Kids, whose rivals are said to include the PDC Crew in
Brixton and the Blood Set in Peckham. A card on one of the bunches of
flowers left outside his maisonette read: “To Remer, Nuff Luv. All da mandem
will miss u heaven’s new fallen soldier. I know U R in a better place now.”
It was signed “Kraze AKA Mokeeda”.
Billy was the third teenager to be shot in South London in 11 days. As he bled
to death, another teenager — from Angola — was being jailed at the Old
Bailey for 30 years for killing a mother of two at a christening party in
Peckham.
In South London’s racial melting pots of Lambeth and Southwark, there were 505
“gun-enabled” crimes last year. Those are figures more associated with
Detroit or Johannesburg than Britain’s capital, and the shootings are no
longer confined to the sink estates of Brixton and Peckham.
The Fenwick estate, where Billy died, is not in the smartest area of Clapham,
but it is just a stone’s throw from Clapham High Street, where Bairstow
Eves, the estate agent, advertises small terraced houses for £600,000,
Oddbins sells £100 bottles of wine and well-heeled shoppers load groceries
into family vans outside the local Sainsbury’s.
“I find it totally shocking,” Elaine Scott, 46, a part-time teacher and
designer, said as she cycled across Clapham Common to fetch her two children
from school. “It’s definitely getting worse. I’m frightened for my children
and for everybody’s children.”
“When we were younger, you worried about knives,” said Alice Whittaker, 27, a
“Clapham Mum” who was walking her two children across the common in a pram.
“Now it’s guns. To hear of people getting shot is very scary.”
Yesterday Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Comissioner, held a crisis
meeting with senior officers and announced that teams of armed police would
start patrolling South London’s gun-crime hotspots.
But grassroots activists said that South London’s gun culture was out of
control, with teenagers determined to emulate older gang members, older gang
members using youngsters to carry their weapons because they cannot be
imprisoned, and firearms ever easier to buy.
“We’re flooded with guns,” Charles Bailey, founder of the Don’t Shoot
Campaign, said. He reckoned that a quarter of unemployed youngers on South
London’s sink estates now possessed weapons — “probably double the number a
couple of years ago”.
“These gangsters don’t care,” said Lucy Cope, who founded a group called
Mothers Against Guns after her son Damian, 22, was shot dead in 2002 after
an argument in Peckham.
“They have no fear. They have taken control of the streets, and it’s time for
the Government and police and communities and parents to take them back.”
Mrs Cope was speaking from a bed in King’s College Hospital, where she is
suffering severe asthma. She said that it was brought on by the strain of
supporting the mother of James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, who was shot dead at
Streatham ice rink on February 3. The same day Javarie Crighton, 21, was
stabbed to death in Peckham. The next day Chamberlain Igwemba, 47 and
Nigerian, was shot dead in Peckham. Two days after that Michael Dosunmu, 15,
was shot dead while at home in his bed in Peckham.
South London is, in effect, an east-west string of wealthy middle-class
“villages” — Blackheath, Dulwich, Clapham, Wandsworth, — separated by large
areas of urban deprivation. And, within those areas, there are tensions
between Africans and West Indians, and between Nigerians and those from
other African countries. But the deaths of Billy Cox and James Andre
Smartt-Ford suggest that few streets anywhere — white, black or mixed — are
still safe.
Everyone has tales of muggings, or worse. Last summer, one woman who lives on
a quiet street in Camberwell watched from her bedroom window as a car gently
bumped the car in front of it. When the first vehicle stopped, two men in
the second got out and robbed the driver at gunpoint.
Billy Cox lived with his white father, Tom, and Thai mother, Kim, in the
bottom right-hand maisonette of a four-storey block on the racially mixed
1960s-era Fenwick estate, home to about 1,000 residents, including many
pensioners.
Some said yesterday that the estate had improved in recent years, but that a
police crackdown on drug dealers outside Clapham North Tube station, a few
hundred yards away, had driven them and their customers — many of them
yuppies — into the relative obscurity of the estate to do their deals.
Billy’s parents were out working on Wednesday afternoon. He probably knew his
killers as there was no sign of them having forced their way into the
maisonette. Police found the back door open. Some residents suggested
yesterday that several teenagers had got in that way and beat him up a few
days before he died.
Other rumours suggested Billy had been killed after a text-message row with
another youth.
Janine Easton, whose children were friends with Billy, said he had been
arguing with another teenager via their mobile phones. She said: “I think it
was something to do with cussing each other on text messages — something as
silly as that.”
Billy’s 13-year-old sister, Elizabeth, a promising dancer understood to have
been accepted recently by the Royal Academy of Dance in nearby Batter-sea,
found him on Wednesday after hearing a loud bang. He had been shot in the
chest.
A friend of his sister said yesterday that he had tried to shield his wounds
from her. Elizabeth tried to administer first aid and called an ambulance.
She ran to a neighbour’s to summon help, but it was all too late.
Friends and residents spoke kindly of the young Crystal Palace fan. Phyllis
Davies, a pensioner who lives in a flat above the Coxes, said: “I live on my
own and he used to take my shopping up the stairs for me. He always wished
me good morning. I just can’t believe it. I watched him grow up.”
Ana Aires, a young Portuguese mother, said that she always asked Billy to look
out for her five-year-old son during kickabouts on the estate — “He would
say, ‘He’s OK with me’.”
Adam Hennessey, 21, said that Billy was “a really nice, smiley guy. I never
heard a bad word said about him.”
Nobody yet knows who killed Billy or why, but Mr Bailey, of the Don’t Shoot
Campaign, said that many teenagers on South London’s rougher estates were
forced to join gangs by threats and peer pressure. “They are scared. They
are intimidated,” he said.
And whereas the weapons of choice used to be knives, they are now guns, known
to the gangs as “straps” or “gats”. If you only have a knife “you are not a
serious player,” said Mr Bailey who is 50, black, and wears a sweat shirt
emblazoned with a red line through a black gun. The “respect culture”, which
makes it a matter of honour to retaliate against perceived slights, has
“always existed. It’s just the weapons that have changed.”
Mrs Cope said of her son’s killer: “If he had not done what he did, he would
have lost all his respect. He had no choice. He was pushed into a corner or
his own gang would have backed off from him.”
The antigun activists said that weapons were easily obtainable, through
underworld contacts or on the internet, and many were simply “reactivated
imitation firearms”, often as simple as rebored airguns that can be bought
for as little as £50.
Detectives investigating the rising tide of murders among London’s black
community say that they have been shocked by the ages of some of the recent
victims and talk of the emergence of “junior sections” among street gangs
whose members become gun runners for their elders.
Gleen Reid, who founded Families for Peace after her son, Corey, was killed in
a nightclub in 2000, said that children as young as five had to be warned of
the dangers of guns and gangs. “Five-year-olds are not five-year-olds any
more. They are so advanced,” she said. “If we wait until they are 13 and 14,
then their heads are already filled with ideas from their peers and it is
too late.”
Outside Billy’s house last night, his friends held a candlelit vigil and Mr
Bailey issued a dire warning. Until now the shooting spree “has not come to
the attention of mainstream Middle England because it’s mainly been black
people killing black people”, he said. “If some middle-class kid from
Knightsbridge had been shot, it would have been big news. But soon it’s
going to be white people as well.”
