Star Wars actor: Killing of my friend Damilola changed my life
Richard Taylor
STAR Wars actor John Boyega has spoken about the killing of his friend Damilola Taylor for the first time.
The 32-year-old had not talked about the tragedy until now but the death of Damilola’s father Richard Taylor changed his mind.
Damilola was 10 when he was slashed with a broken bottle and left to die in Peckham, South East London, in 2000.
John and his sister Grace were among the last people to see the youngster alive.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Last Word: “From the hours we left him in Peckham to the hours when I went home, then the police was at our door and there was a whole investigation we were involved in, (it) was life changing for me.
Impact
“It shaped me through the years and affected my perspective on certain things.
“My sister was very, very close with Damilola, went through a lot, and my dad had to try to protect her in that journey.”
The actor said a poem written by the youngster and read at his funeral hit hard. He added: “To think that somebody as young as me could pass away in such a horrific way was hard for me to understand or comprehend.
“That [poem] spoke about what Damilola wanted to achieve, how far he wanted his dreams to spread, who he wanted to impact. I found that quite profound. I was like, ‘I have no excuse. I want to be a movie star’.”
John, who plays Finn in The Force Awakens and its sequels, said he used to imagine what his friend would be like today, believing he “would have grown up to be someone great”.
Damilola’s dad Richard died at 75 on March 23. He and wife Gloria set up The Damilola Taylor Trust, turning loss into “something triumphant”. Their son’s killers, brothers Ricky and Danny Preddie, were jailed in 2006.
Civil servant and campaigner
BORN OCTOBER 28, 1948 – DIED MARCH 23, 2024, AGED 75
RICHARD Taylor campaigned tirelessly for two decades to prevent knife crime after his 10-year-old son Damilola Taylor was fatally stabbed in a south London housing estate stairwell in November 2000.
Football-mad Damilola, who dreamed of becoming a doctor, was returning from an after-school computer club when he was set upon by two youths just a few hundred yards from his home.
They stabbed him in the leg with a broken bottle, severing his femoral artery, and fled the scene, leaving Damilola to bleed to death.
Following six years of police investigations and three Crown Court trials, brothers Ricky and Danny Preddie, 12 and 13 at the time of the killing, were convicted of manslaughter and given eight-year youth custody services.
Taylor, a civil servant, and his wife Gloria, a bank manager, were devastated by the lenient sentence but resolved to help disadvantaged children by founding the Damilola Taylor Trust in 2001.
Drawing on his charm and diplomacy, Taylor kept his son’s name alive in the years after his death through the politicians, celebrities, royalty and police chiefs he met. He was appointed an antiknife crime envoy under then-prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009.
He talked at school assemblies and in classrooms, educating youngsters about knife crime and spoke of the devastation, loss and pain he and his family had endured.
Richard Adeyemi Taylor was born into a middle-class family in Lagos, Nigeria, and moved to Britain to study public administration at Harrow Polytechnic.
In 1982 Following his marriage to Gloria and the birth of daughter Gbemi and son Tunde, Taylor returned to Lagos to work as a civil servant in the defence ministry.
Damilola was born in 1989 and Gloria returned to Britain with the three children to find treatment for Gbemi’s severe epilepsy.
Taylor joined his family in Britain after his son’s death. Gloria died in 2008 following a heart attack.
Taylor, who was awarded an OBE in 2011, stepped back from campaigning in 2020, saying: “Twenty years has taken a toll on me.”
He said he wanted his son to be remembered as “our boy of hope”.
In his last interview back in November, Taylor said: “The spirit of Damilola will always remain with us. It’s been over 23 years and the memory is still with people, and that encouraged me to campaign.”
He added: “Young people need hope. It may not be rosy for them but they don’t need to despair.”
Taylor died of prostate cancer. He is survived by Tunde, Gbemi and daughter Florence.