Garry Newlove didn’t stand a chance against the teenage gang that attacked him outside his home in Warrington on a warm August evening last year. When he went to remonstrate with them about vandalising his wife’s car, the father of three was knocked to the ground. The gang, led by Adam Swellings, known as “Swellhead” – who had been released from cells only hours before and should not have been in Warrington – laughed as they kicked Newlove’s head like a football.

After the court case last week in which Swellings and others were convicted of murder, Newlove’s widow, Helen, 44, paid unbearably moving tribute to “a caring, loving, funny and most of all a family man”. They had done everything together for 26 years, she said. Earlier, she had told the court that when she saw her husband in hospital there was a bootprint stamped onto his forehead in blood.

Newlove had tried to launch a community-wide campaign to oust the gang of drunken youths that terrorised the neighbourhood. His brutal murder seems to sum up the helplessness felt by the public in the face of Britain’s gang culture.

Two hundred miles away, in London, Veronique Muteba was following the coverage of the Newlove case with a sense of weary recognition. She lost her own “good, hard-working family man” in the same way 15 months ago, when her husband, Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba, was stabbed to death on their doorstep.

Like Newlove, Muteba, 41, was killed because he had the temerity to confront the gang of teenagers that plagued the housing-association block where he lived in Evergreen Square, Hackney. “When I heard about Garry Newlove’s murder, I could not believe that it had happened again,” she says. “Helen Newlove was so dignified, but I could see her grief in her eyes. If you have not been through it yourself, you have no idea what it’s like.” Veronique’s husband, a brilliant mathematician, had fled war-torn Congo to find a better life in Britain, but instead died alone in a cold stairwell on an east London housing estate.

“Our lives were destroyed that night,” says his 30-year-old widow. “I’m now left to raise our daughters alone and my girls no longer have a father. Stevens doesn’t have the chance to fulfil the dreams that he held for all of us.”

Muteba’s daughters, Debbie, 8, and Sheridan, 5, have been devastated by the loss. “They are too scared even to go to the bath-room by themselves,” Veronique says. “I must wait outside the door because they worry that when they come out I will be gone. Debbie suffers from nightmares and Sheridan says she sees blood everywhere when she’s at school.”

Muteba arrived in Britain 11 years ago. He wanted to train as a teacher and threw himself into learning English. Such was his talent, he was offered a place at Cambridge to study maths. But for complicated reasons he instead took a place at Brighton University.

In Congo, the engineer’s son had organised a student protest against President Mobutu and been arrested. “When Mobutu was in power, people who protested against him would just disappear,” Veronique says. “As far as Stevens was concerned, he would have been killed if he’d stayed.” The irony goes without saying.

When the couple’s first daughter was born, they moved to a flat in Evergreen Square. The estate had been praised as a prime example of the regeneration of London and was just yards from the Blairs’ first marital home.

“At first it was a nice place to live,” Veronique says. “It was a quiet neighbourhood and people looked out for each other.” But when a gang of black teenagers known as the Holly Street Boys decided the estate’s stairwells offered a place for them to take and deal drugs, the atmosphere changed.

“We found ourselves having to ask permission to get into our own homes. They were only about 17 to 19 and none of them even lived there but we felt really scared. Sometimes there’d be girls there too and we’d step out of the door in the morning and find condoms on the floor. It was terrible.” The stairwells were locked but the gang then started breaking in through a window to reach them.

“We called the police but they told us not to do anything. They said if they [the gang members] weren’t doing anything to our flat, they could not help us, even though they were breaking in to private property.”

The couple called the Hackney housing association that ran the estate to ask to be moved but could only be put on a waiting list.

The night Muteba died he had just come home from a shift driving a fork-lift truck at Tesco. The gang was in the stairwell.

“We’d been invited to a friend’s 40th birthday party but Stevens was tired and didn’t feel up to going. I cooked some food for the party, did the ironing for the coming week and got the girls ready. We all left the house together at 6.15pm as Stevens wanted to get a haircut. Stevens kissed me goodbye and said he would see me later. That was the last kiss, the last time I saw him alive.”

What happened later, Veronique had to piece together. Muteba returned home at 10pm to find the group outside his flat. They were shouting, swearing and smoking cannabis once again, and he’d had enough. “I don’t know what happened to make him want to confront them,” she says, looking at the floor. “He never had before.”

According to a court report, Muteba ordered them out, and in doing so he may have torn the ringleader Joseph Ekaette’s new top: in any case, a “violent struggle” ensued. The gang started chanting, “Shank him, shank him”, street slang for “stab”. Muteba was stabbed through the heart and was dead on arrival at Homerton hospital.

When Veronique returned home soon after 10.30pm, she knew something was wrong. “As I drove in I saw the flashing lights of the police and that the estate was taped off. I could see Stevens’s car so I thought, ‘It’s okay, it’s not him, he’s at home’.”

She called their home phone. When Stevens failed to answer, she tried his mobile. “I tried to get past the police, but then I saw my neighbour pointing at me. I started shaking. The police asked me if I was Mrs Muteba, and then told me Stevens had been stabbed and that he was critical. The girls were with me and we were all crying.”

As she arrived at the hospital, police officers came out and told her he was dead. “I can only remember shouting that I wanted to see him,” she says. “They wouldn’t let me.” The next day, she broke the news to her daughters that their father had died.

“Debbie sat down next to me and asked me how Daddy was.I told her that Daddy had passed away and that he was with Jesus. She started to cry, and then Sheridan saw her crying and started to cry too, even though she didn’t understand what had happened. She had only just turned four.” Two days after Stevens’s funeral, Veronique and her daughters were moved at the request of the police. “Moving house was very difficult for Sheridan. She thought that her dad was still at the old house and that we had to go back there to see him. I decided to take them to the cemetery to explain where Daddy was now.”

Ekaette, an 18-year-old illegal immigrant who came over from Nigeria, was arrested in Leices-ter a month later. No DNA evidence or weapon was ever recovered. In November he was sentenced to life in prison for Muteba’s murder. As in the Newlove case, the attacker had been involved in other crimes, including the rape of a 14-year-old girl, which he had filmed on his mobile phone.

Last week, in the light of the Newlove case, politicians of all hues lined up to denounce gang culture, but Veronique fears these are empty words. “Once, Stevens called the police to complain about the gang and they told us to leave them alone,” she says. “I think that even the police are scared of them, so you get brave men like my husband and Garry Newlove who have to tackle them themselves. Nothing will change unless something drastic is done. There is a lack of discipline and responsibility.”

Veronique is planning to set up a foundation in Stevens’s name to help children whose parents are the victims of knife and gun crime. “I know he would have wanted me to do something,” she says. “All he wanted to do was to provide a better life for his family. He has had that opportunity stolen from him but I am still here, so it is up to me to prove to the girls that he did everything he could for them and that he did not want to leave them.”

Earlier this year Veronique was presented with Stevens’s posthumous diploma. “I want my girls to know what a good and hard-working man their father was.”

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