Damilola

This first appeared on Facebook on this day last year, when it was announced that Richard Taylor, the father of murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor, had died.

I was very sad to hear the news that Richard Taylor, the father of murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor, had died at the age of 75. When Damilola was murdered by other children on the North Peckham estate in 2000, I was the Panorama specials producer, responsible for making one-off, hour-long programmes to document special events in the news. It was plain, from the outset, that this awful murder of a 10-year-old on his way home from school, via the local library, was a story that simply had to be investigated and told.

As you might imagine, the family, then secreted away in a hotel in Blackheath by the Met Police, was inundated with media requests for interviews and documentary offerings. I dropped off a letter at the Peckham flat of a relative that the family had been staying with and waited. In the end, Panorama’s was the only approach in which the family was at all interested. When we met, they made it clear it was because they trusted us and the BBC. It was down to us to repay that trust.

Over the next two years, Fergal Keane, the reporter in the film, and I spent countless hours with Richard, his wife Gloria and their other two children Tunde and Gbemi. We even travelled to Lagos, Nigeria with Richard to film, retrospectively, the story of Damilola’s childhood before he came to the UK with his mother only three months earlier so that his sister could receive treatment for epilepsy.

All the time the thing that struck us most was not just the fortitude with which Richard coped with his appalling loss, but his dignity and his decency. And it wasn’t just us. The officer in charge of the murder investigation told me, at one point, that he and the other officers on the case were absolutely determined to catch those responsible: “The guys just want to do it for him” he said.

Our film was broadcast at the end of the first trial connected with his murder, when four defendants, some of whom were assuredly guilty, were acquitted. Richard remained philosophical, convinced that in the end justice would be done for his son. Even so, who could ever forget the anguished, heart-rending cry which echoed out over the North Peckham estate when he was first taken to the spot, a grimy stairwell, where Damilola was fatally stabbed with a broken bottle: “Is this where my son died” he howled.

Eventually, in 2006, two of those responsible, the brothers Danny and Ricky Preddie, were convicted of manslaughter and jailed for 8 years. Other members of the gang responsible are still at liberty.

I was honoured to be asked by Richard to become a trustee of the Damilola Taylor Trust which he set up in 2001. Sadly, I later had to leave the Trust, though its vital work of tackling knife crime in SE London continued. Richard and I lost touch over the years, but I have never forgotten this deeply honourable, decent man who bore his loss with such extraordinary dignity. May he rest in peace.

If you want to see the Panorama film we made about Damilola, it’s here: