The killers next door
My uncle only wanted to keep our community safe Keisha Tomlin, 30, south London
Walking home from school, I spotted my uncle Ian jogging in the park. ‘What you up to, trouble?’ he grinned, stopping to chat.
It was September 2002, and we lived in a closeknit community on the Doddington Estate in Battersea, south London. Ian Tomlin, then 30, was well known. An amateur boxer, he was passionate about keeping fit. Every day, he went to Battersea Park to run, skip and do pull-ups. Just 13, I adored my uncle. He looked out for everyone, helped older residents with their shopping.
My grandma Monica, then 65, had seven sons, including my dad and Ian. Even though they’d all grown up and had kids, they’d stayed close by. Grandma was the heart of the family – and, every Sunday, we’d pile into her kitchen for Jamaican red snapper with fried dumplings.
Back then, the estate was a great place to live – everyone knew each other, there was a real community spirit.
But as I reached my teens, things changed.
New people moved in, started hanging around the corridors, acting suspiciously.
‘Stay away from them,’ Uncle Ian warned.
Aged 14, I moved to a different part of London, but I’d still visit Grandma and the rest of my family.
As the years passed, I saw how much the decline of the estate bothered Ian.
He had two young kids by then, wanted them to grow up safely, like I had.
But, now, the estate was overrun with drug dealers – we watched as people we’d known years became addicts.
Needles littered the floor. People stood in doorways smoking who knows what.
We saw how drugs were wrecking people’s lives.
‘The estate doesn’t feel safe any more,’ I told Ian.
And the problems were right on his doorstep.
Ian’s next-door neighbour Gary Beech had started dealing from his flat.
Beech’s mate Michael Swan would visit, and they’d ply their trade under Ian’s nose.
Their dodgy dealings
They hit him with such force, the wood of the bat split
attracted all sorts of unsavoury people to Ian’s corridor.
People even accidentally rang his doorbell, looking to score.
‘I don’t want my kids around these lowlifes,’ Ian would fume.
By October 2018, he’d had enough. He asked Beech and Swan to stop selling drugs outside his front door. But the pair didn’t listen. A war of words began. Every so often, it’d flair up as Ian took them to task. Things grew tense. Then, on 17 October, my sister Grace called, in tears. ‘Ian’s dead,’ she blubbed. ‘Ian from EastEnders?’
I asked, confused.
I couldn’t process what she was saying.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Uncle Ian.’ Unable to believe it, I hung up, raced to the estate.
Spotting the police tape everywhere, a sickening ache lodged in my stomach. Grace is right.
I ran to my grandma’s flat, found her shaking and crying. ‘My son’s dead,’ she wailed. My poor, elderly grandmother, 81, had walked to Ian’s block and seen her son lying in a pool of blood.
Something no mother should ever have to see.
The police told us they’d arrested Beech and Swan on suspicion of murder.
A post-mortem revealed Ian died from blunt head trauma and stab wounds to the neck.
Police believed he’d been beaten with a baseball bat.
It was too horrible to think about.
The months that followed passed in a blur.
Our family was broken. Ian was the most amazing dad, son, uncle, friend, brother.
He’d spent his life looking out for others.
Now he’d been violently taken from us.
We couldn’t even say goodbye for months, as police held Ian’s body until March this year.
In April, at the Old Bailey, Gary Beech, 48, and Michael Swan, 45, pleaded not guilty to Ian’s murder.
I sat with my grandma and uncles through every day of the trial.
The court heard that, on the evening Ian died, he’d been making his way back from work around 5.30pm.
Arriving at the flats, he passed Beech and Swan – words were exchanged, tempers flared.
Ian armed himself with a baseball bat and chain
– a desperate bid to scare off the drug-dealing duo.
Only, a fight broke out, Ian was overpowered.
But that wasn’t enough for Beech and Swan.
They carried on beating my poor uncle with the bat.
Hit him with such force, the wood split. Stabbed him repeatedly in the neck, then left him for dead.
Prosecutors called the attack ‘extraordinarily vicious’.
By the time paramedics arrived, it was too late.
Ian was pronounced dead. Listening to the evidence was pure agony.
Losing Ian like that sent our family to hell and back.
Beech and Swan both tried to claim they’d attacked Ian in self-defence – but the whole thing had been caught on CCTV.
They were found guilty of murder.
The judge said Ian armed himself ‘fearing violence’, and died ‘trying to combat serious antisocial behaviour in his block’.
At the sentencing, a statement written by my grandmother was read out.
She told how our family had been smothered in grief.
How losing Ian had left a hole in her heart that could never be filled.
I sobbed at her words. Both men were jailed for life, Beech with a minimum of 21 years, Swan 19 years.
Yet no prison sentence can make up for what my family has lost.
The estate I grew up on will never feel like home again.
After Ian died, local people paid tribute to him: a man who was one of them and only wanted to keep them safe.
A local councillor said that he hoped ‘his passing will leave a legacy of change on the estate where he lived and died’.
I can only hope that’s true. All Ian wanted was to live in a nice community, free from drugs and violence. But he paid the ultimate price.