Youngest drug gang victim, 14, ‘fell through gaps’
Review finds authorities missed vital opportunity to protect teenager from county lines criminals
POLICE found Britain’s youngest gang victim “clearly being criminally exploited” in a county lines drug den three months before his murder, but authorities missed an opportunity to protect him, a review has found.
Jaden Moodie was only 14 when four attackers in a car rammed his stolen moped then stabbed him to death in a suspected drug-related murder in Leyton, east London, in January 2019. He was the youngest victim in a series of gangland killings last year.
Yesterday, a serious case review concluded the teenager, who had moved to Waltham Forest, east London, from Nottinghamshire several months earlier, was being exploited by a county lines drug trafficking network.
Police and care authorities were said to have missed a “pivotal moment” to save him from organised crime after he was found in a “cuckoo house” in Bournemouth in October 2018.
A cuckoo house is a property typically occupied by a vulnerable individual which drug dealers seize as a base for their county lines operations.
The 77-page review, published by the Waltham Forest Safeguarding Children Board, described how Dorset Police found Jaden, named only as Child C, with another boy from Waltham Forest, aged 17, in a flat where there was “significant evidence” of crack cocaine dealing.
He was arrested for being in possession of 39 wraps of crack cocaine, with two larger crack cocaine packages also recovered along with a mobile phone and £325 in cash. It was the third time in a month that the flat had been raided – with officers each time finding children from the London area inside.
Jaden was taken back to London by Dorset Police, in part because Waltham Forest council did not have access to specialist child exploitation workers who could reach as far as Bournemouth.
It was a “missed opportunity” that the review said highlighted a problem plaguing county lines cases – vulnerable children found “a distance away from their home” slipping through the cracks because numerous agencies from different regions lack a co-ordinated national strategy”.
The “response” of policing and care authorities while Jaden was detained and “then on his return” from Bournemouth “did not capitalise on a ‘reachable’ moment for a child who was clearly being criminally exploited”, the review said. “Nor was all the information available from the authorities in Bournemouth transferred to their counterparts in Waltham Forest,” it continued.
Ayoub Majdouline, then 19, was convicted and jailed for the murder of Jaden in December 2019.
‘Response did not capitalise on a “reachable” moment for a child who was clearly being criminally exploited’