‘Once a gang has your child there’s nothing you can do’
A MOTHER whose 16-year-old son died after becoming ensnared by county lines drug dealers believes that tougher action from the criminal justice system might have saved his life.
Karla, 44, a single mother whose son Jacob died this year at their home in Banbury, Oxfordshire, last night told The Mail on Sunday: ‘They need to be stricter on them when they are younger.
‘Our house was raided by police and more than one knife was found, but nothing happened to Jacob. The kids have to realise there are consequences.’
Social services were heavily involved in Jacob’s case and he was placed in residential care 12 months ago in an effort to keep him away from the drugs gangs.
Within days of returning home, however, the then 15-year-old was back in their clutches and dealing heroin and cocaine. ‘He sat there and his exact words to me were, “I can do what the f*** I like until I’m 18 because the law can’t touch me,” ’ his mother explains.
It appears he had a point. As his mother says: ‘Obviously I didn’t want him to get into trouble, but there was no consequence to what was going on and his confidence grew and the behaviour got worse.
‘With under-18s, it’s very difficult because [the authorities] don’t like to criminalise them. I understand that to a certain degree, but I think you’re just creating a monster at 18.’
Karla, who has asked for her surname not to be published, is reluctant to criticise the police because she appreciates how hard they and social services worked to help her son.
But she believes that a tougher approach combined with more resources for police, social services and youth services may prevent other youngsters falling foul of county lines dealers. She recounts her son’s transformation first from victim to perpetrator and then to becoming a grim statistic after being found dead at home earlier this year.
Karla, a care-home worker, believes his death was a cry for help gone wrong because he had fallen thousands of pounds in debt to dealers further up the chain.
A fortnight before his death, his face was slashed in circumstances which are still not clear.
‘This isn’t a big rough city, it’s a little market town and it doesn’t matter if you’re a single mum or married, if they get hold of your kid, there’s nothing you can do,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even know what county lines was until he got embroiled in it and I spoke to social services and the police.
‘Jacob had two phones. One I didn’t initially know about and it would be going off throughout the evening and he’d be in and out for short spells. It became obvious what he was doing, but there was no way I could stop it.’
Karla thinks the knife crime epidemic plaguing Britain is also caused by the same lack of early intervention. ‘Jacob was caught with a knife more than once and nothing happened,’ she says. ‘If there was more of a deterrent, maybe they might think twice.’