A masked machete gang storming an 18th birthday party in a church. A pitched battle between 100 youths. And a straight-A student’s life bleeding away in the road...
The scene which greets you on the corner of Morgan Street in east London has become all-too familiar in towns and cities across Britain. Outside a row of terraced town houses, tied to the railings are balloons, flowers, cards and handwritten notes. One reads: ‘You are funny, caring, loving, silly, cool and kind. You did not deserve to die.’
These words refer to 17-year- old Shea Gordon. It was here at this very spot, in the early hours of last Sunday, that the straight-A student’s life slowly ebbed away after he was stabbed in the neck.
For 45 desperate minutes, paramedics battled to save him.
The medical team could be heard counting ‘1, 2, 1, 2’ as they pounded the teenager’s chest to administer CPR.
Shea was eventually airlifted to hospital where he was pronounced dead just before 2am. Blood on the pavement — just a short stroll from Tredegar Square, one of the finest Georgian plazas in London — was still visible more than 24 hours later.
Shea’s death, in a corner of the capital where homes sell for nearly £2 million, has heightened fears in the local community that no one is safe any more and no neighbourhood is immune from the savagery which is infecting too many areas of the country.
Surely there can be no more chilling proof than what happened to Shea; it was more than just a knife attack.
The fatal stabbing, in a gentrified conservation area, not far from Mile end tube station, followed a mass brawl involving up to 100
The presence of so many friends is testament to just how loved he was
people, and at the centre of the melee were machete-wielding thugs in balaclavas. It was a war zone.
The loss of such a young life is always a tragedy but the past also tells us that teenagers who are killed in such circumstances can also be part of the problem.
Was Shea part of the problem?
‘I put my hand on my heart and say Shea was not in a gang,’ insisted his grandmother, who has spent hours at the roadside floral shrine together with other members of his family and closest friends.
‘I would tell you if he was. A 100 per cent, he is not in a gang. If he had been in a gang I would say because I don’t see why mothers and grandparents should hide it.’
Shea, who lived with his mother and had four younger brothers and a sister, was highly academic.
he told everyone he wanted to get into the property business when he left college. he had dreams of being an entrepreneur.
‘he was a good boy,’ his greatgrandmother added softly.
The presence of so many relatives and friends gathered at the spot where he collapsed and died is testament to just how loved he was.
Shea had travelled from his home in enfield, north London, to attend an 18th birthday party last Saturday at a Pentecostal church in Bow, just a few yards from where he would bleed to death.
‘he went to the party on his own,’ his grandmother told me. ‘he had told his friends he didn’t want to go but then he changed his mind.
‘he had been invited by the girl whose party it was.’
her grandson, she said, was on the guest list. It is an important point to stress.
Trouble erupted, the police said, after ‘a number of uninvited persons’ gate-crashed the function.
Those are the bare facts which culminated in the brutal attack on Shea shortly after midnight and also left an 18- year- old in a critical condition in hospital with head injuries.
But there is, not unsurprisingly, a disturbing back story to this chain of events. A report by council youth violence coordinators revealed that Tower hamlets, where Shea was attacked, has, in recent years, endured some of London’s highest levels of ‘gang flagged offences’.
Gang members were among the youngest in the city, the briefing document said, stabbings by offenders aged under 25 were prevalent, and heroin and crack cocaine dealing was rife in the borough.
Police usually need a ‘reasonable suspicion’ to stop and search an individual.
But in the aftermath of the brawl a Section 60 was issued allowing officers to stop and search without suspicion because they believed there were still ‘persons armed with weapons’ in the vicinity and they were worried about reprisals. Discarded machetes and knives were later found under parked cars in the streets around the former holy Trinity Church, now occupied by epainos Ministries, part of the New Testament Church of God, where the party was held.
Being refused entry to the building might have been the catalyst for the mayhem, but few believe it was the real reason for the wanton lawlessness.
Shortly before all hell broke loose, a very large crowd was
spotted heading for the church. One witness said he had never seen so many people ‘marching, not walking’ up the road.
they were ‘masked up’ and some had machetes, leaving him in little
doubt that ‘they had come for an attack’. Why else would they be primed for battle?
the scene the witness described had echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s portrayal of ‘ ultra violence’ in a dystopian, futuristic Britain in his cult 1970s film A Clockwork Orange.
rumours circulating suggested a gang from Aberfeldy in neighbouring Poplar were in the e3 postcode, which covers Bow, on the night in question.
One of their rivals, it is said, is a gang from the roman road area, a main artery running through the heart of Bow. gangs from those areas were certainly highlighted in
the report by the council youth violence coordinators.
the roman road crew is — or at least was — called rBS: roman Blood Shedderz. Others in tower Hamlets included the iOD (isle of Dogs Boys), DrF (Devons road
Family), globe town Massive, JSM (Jubilee Street Massive) and S Block.
tit-for-tat reprisals are endemic: entering a rival’s territory or ‘dissing’ another gang in so-called drill rap videos have triggered mindless outbreaks of violence.
even a petty dispute over a belt resulted in a virtual field hospital being set up next to a children’s play area in Camberwell, South London a few years ago to treat the wounded.
the upmarket enclave around the new testament Church of god has, until now anyway, escaped many of the problems that have
plagued the rest of tower Hamlets — a borough with the highest child
poverty rate in Britain — where there were an average of 40 knife crimes a month last year.
Suspected gang activity in this once peaceful quarter, however, has reared its head in recent months. Khaitee Mills, manager of
the nearby Morgan Arms, has now been told by the police not to speak to the Press, but in an interview with MyLondon website, she said: ‘there have been a couple of instances where two or three young kids have come to hide in the back of the pub.
‘they [were being followed] by some of the guys with balaclava
face coverings on bikes, hanging
She opened her door to see the air ambulance ‘parked’ outside
around outside looking for them. eventually, they dispersed and the kids left.’
the teenagers, who looked 14 or 15, told her that if they went outside they ‘would be stabbed’.
‘We tried to communicate with them, but they’d just say “we don’t want to talk, just need to hide”.
it made me feel uneasy. But,
obviously we have a duty to protect people.’
Several days ago, one of the boys she had given refuge to had his bike stolen.
‘two guys on their bikes, who were proper adults, not youths, came across and knocked him off his bike and then went off with it,’ said Miss Mills, who fears the incident may be connected to the most recent explosion of violence.
People began arriving for the party, on foot and by car, at around 8pm. Security guards checked tickets at the back entrance of the church, in Lichfield road.
it is unclear when those who did not have a ticket gatecrashed the event.
But sometime after midnight the screaming started. How many people got caught up in the confrontation? 50? 70?
Possibly as many as 100, by all accounts — a number of whom had deadly weapons.
‘Stay with me, stay with me,’ friends of Shea gordon could be heard telling him, trying to keep him conscious, amid the chaos after he had been stabbed.
Shea managed to stagger several hundred yards before collapsing outside Anne Penketh’s house.
‘i heard screaming but i did not think there was anything serious going on until i heard the police sirens,’ said Anne, a crime writer,
and the former diplomatic editor of the independent newspaper.
When she opened the door, she saw a figure lying across the pavement with paramedics around him. the London air ambulance was ‘parked’ in the street. ‘it was shocking,’ said Miss Penketh.
the notice authorising the police to use additional stop and search powers in the aftermath of the fatal stabbing was posted on the tower Hamlets neighbourhood Watch Association.
it is not the first time police had been granted such powers in tower Hamlets.
July 3: Section 60 notice issued after a 16-year-old boy was hospitalised with potentially life-changing injuries which appeared to be ‘gang- related’ and the risk of revenge attacks was ‘substantial’.
July 19: Section 60 notice issued after a 16- year- old boy was
repeatedly stabbed by a gang armed with machetes.
August 12: Section 60 notice issued covering three postcodes — e1, e3 [which includes the streets where the machete brawl broke out] and e4 — after eight separate reports in the space of 90
minutes of people fighting with knives, axes or weapons.
the increasing prevalence of machetes in such confrontations is especially disturbing.
in June last year, onlookers in Hyde Park were horrified to witness a machete-wielding gang set upon a youth in broad daylight. A
17-year-old was later said to have recovered from the injuries sustained in the royal park.
Figures released under Freedom of information laws from police
forces in england and Wales show machete-related offences have doubled in two years.
they were used in 1,364 crimes in november and December last year, compared with 664 for the same period in 2019, and an almost sixfold increase on the 229 in those two months in 2014.
the true figure is even higher as the Met, the country’s biggest force, did not provide statistics.
it can’t be just a coincidence that gang- related violence has coincided with the closure of so many police stations. Front desks in many stations, including one in Bow, have also been shut to allow more officers to be deployed on neighbourhood patrols.
the bottom line, however, is that the police have become invisible in most neighbourhoods.
By the end of the week, more flowers and notes had been left on the pavement outside Anne Penketh’s house in Morgan Street where Shea gordon collapsed.
One from his auntie said: ‘You made us all so proud. You were everything.’
two hours after Shea was stabbed to death in mass brawl, a man was shot dead in an affluent part of west London.
Haven’t we now arrived in the dystopian future portrayed in A Clockwork Orange?