Glance at the basic, odious details of Rhys Jones’s murder and certain, predictable images come to mind. This, you assume, must have happened on the mean streets of a deprived area pocked with boarded-up buildings and vicious dogs. People must be afraid to leave their homes if they live in a place where an 11-year-old child wearing an Everton kit and shin pads can be shot dead at point-blank range.

But the neighbourhood where Rhys lived confounds every expectation, every prejudice. This is the sort of place where residents could win best-kept garden awards, where hanging baskets and ornamental water features remain, unvandalised, outside most of the £180,000 detached and semi-detached houses.

Polished Audis and Mazdas sit on the drives. It is what estate agents might call “aspirational” — a place, ironically, where people might get on the ladder to escape the drug and violence problems that blight a place sucha as nearby Croxteth proper, or “Crocky” as it is known to the locals.

Yet desirable cul-de-sacs and local pride have not made Croxteth Park — the second-biggest private estate in Europe, built on the grounds of the Sefton family in 1884 — immune to the gun and drug subculture.

Though many residents said that they were totally unaware of a problem with gangs or firearms on their doorsteps, some teenagers told a different story. They said that gangs from nearby Norris Green and Croxteth — who hail largely from the deprived area where Wayne Rooney grew up — were becoming a creeping, menacing presence on the streets to people of their age.

As forensic scientists in white suits picked over the pub car park where Rhys fell bleeding, a group of teenage boys near by were in no doubt that the child had been the innocent victim of a feud gone wrong.

They believe that the killer either intended to hit someone else, perhaps drinking at the pub, or mistook Rhys for another boy.

Gang members from both sides, they said, often arrived on their bikes dressed all in black and wearing hats. “There are things happening all the time but you don’t read about it in the papers,” one of the boys said. “Sometimes they’ll just fire air pellets, so nothing really gets done about it. But it’s all meant to intimidate people.”

As rumours became more feverish, another — also unsubstantiated — theory circulating yesterday was that Rhys may have fallen victim to an “initiation killing”, in which would-be gang members are told to carry out a killing or wounding to test their nerve.

But the terrible sight of weeping neighbours entering the neat, semidetached home of Rhys’s parents showed how disastrously two worlds have, for whatever reason, collided.

A policeman stood guard under the apple tree outside their front door, and on the main road young boys from Rhys’s primary school filed past in tears to lay floral tributes at the Fir Tree pub. The pub, where Rhys had been passing after football training, is a respectable restaurant and bar, a far cry, for example, from pubs such as the notorious Dog and Gun in the rougher end of Croxteth that has now been closed down.

But youths tend to congregate outside an adjacent strip of shops and last year, after residents voiced their concern, the area was made a “designated” zone, meaning that police become more highly visible and can disperse groups of people. The scheme ended in November.

Older residents said that they genuinely had no sense of a gun problem. Bill Morgan, 70, who lives in the same cul-de-sac as Rhys’s family said: “I have certainly never seen any of it. A while ago we got a few teenagers hanging around, but they were more of a menace than a threat.”

Another neighbour, Jane Towey, 26, said that she, too, had never had any trouble and was shocked by the killing. In common with her neighbours she is convinced that Rhys, a friendly boy who would knock on a neighbour’s door to ask if he could play with his labrador, was not the intended target.

“There is no way anyone would want to shoot Rhys,” she said. “He was a shy, polite — just a really wellmannered — kid. He doesn’t even look old for his age. You get a few hoodies hanging round the shops, but I know the kids who play on the street round here and they’re nice.”

Rhys’s grandmother, Doreen Jones, added: “It’s a very nice area where they live, but the kids come in from other estates — it’s getting out of control.”

Rhys never spent his time hanging around the shops, preferring to set up a goal against his parents’ garage and play football at home, and was in the pub car park only because he was walking home after football training.

Paul Breen, 47, from nearby Norris Green, tells a terrifying story. In October he walked out of his house at night and saw a group of youths dressed in black walking behind a 15-year-old carrying a pump action shotgun.

“They had been sent by an adult to our estate to shoot someone, but they didn’t get him. So they caught another lad in the chip shop and terrorised him, holding a gun into his ear.”

Attempts to take it to the police, he claims, got him nowhere. Later he stood in the local elections as the Gun Crime Prevention candidate. He received 141 votes.

Mr Breen, who has written books on the Liverpool gangster scene, said: “This shooting doesn’t surprise me at all. It won’t be the last. It won’t be long before they take them to school. It all goes back to drugs. The dealers have 13 to 14-year-olds selling their heroin on the streets.

“The kids have more money in their pockets than their parents. They’re buying state-of-the-art weaponry. The police are in denial.”

But Rose Bailey, a local councillor, insisted that gangs were not a big problem in the area. “This has sent shockwaves throughout our community. We don’t have a problem with gangs in this area; we have a problem with a very small group. We have never had a gang culture.

“I have lived in Croxteth for 26 years now and I have never, ever, been afraid to walk the streets. I have a son. You expect a phone call saying your son has been injured playing football, you don’t expect a call saying he’s been shot dead.”

Behind the white, strip blinds of the Croxteth Park Estate yesterday, residents were having to re-evaluate the neighbourhood where they have always felt safe.

And, nearby, a tiny white tent on a pub forecourt marked the spot where an 11-year-old fell dying and, as a result, this neighbourhood’s history was changed for ever.

Tale of two streets

Crompton Drive, Croxteth Park Estate

Categorised as “Comfortably off, settled suburbia. Middle-income, older couples”

205

Semi-detached houses and bungalows

119

Households with income of £30,000-£39,999

101

Males working full-time

166

Homes owned outright (without mortgage)

121

Two-car families

Redruth Road, Croxteth Estate

Categorised as “Hard-pressed, struggling families. Low-rise terraced estates of poorly-off workers”

253

Terraced houses and bungalows

160

Households with income of £0-£9,999

80

Males working full-time

222

Homes rented from council or housing association

164

No of cars or vans

Source: Acorn

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