Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Evil train rage killer’s violent gangland past
Slashed man’s neck in Psychiatrist said he row over cigarette paper posed no risk to others
THE crazed thug who stabbed a 51-year-old dad to death on a train was a career criminal and member of a notorious gang.
Darren Pencille, 36, was described by police as “devious and dangerous” as he was yesterday sentenced to life with a minimum of 28 years.
Pencille stabbed dad Lee Pomeroy 18 times in front of his 14-year-old son after a row aboard a train near Guildford, in Surrey, in January.
It emerged yesterday Pencille was a cannabis-addict involved with the South Man Syndicate gang in London, which has terrorised Tooting, Streatham and Thornton Heath since the 1990s.
One former gang member said of the killer: “He smoked weed constantly and was a complete psycho. I feel so sorry for the man he killed – and his son.”
Pencille’s long criminal past includes more than a dozen convictions. He once sliced a man’s neck in a row over a cigarette paper.
It was also revealed he was seen by a psychiatrist just 24 hours before the murder, but was considered “no risk to himself or others”.
Pencille was convicted of ABH following a fight in 1999 and twice convicted of having a blade, in 2002 and 2004. In 2010 he was jailed for GBH after stabbing a fellow hostel resident in West Norwood, South London, twice in the neck.
DCI Sam Blackburn, of British Transport Police, said of Pencille: “He is both devious and dangerous…
“[It was] probably the most horrific scene I have been to…
“Just the level of violence you could see that had been used, from the horrific nature with the amount of blood that was in that carriage.”
At London’s Old Bailey, Mrs Justice Cheema-grubb told Pencille, of no fixed abode: “You will spend the best years of the life left to you in prison.”
His girlfriend Chelsea Mitchell, 28, of Farnham, Surrey, was found guilty of assisting him and got 28 months.