In 2003, a desire for revenge cost two innocent girls their lives. They had no consideration for anyone who was actually out on that night. We know we’re talking about a gun, the Mac-10, that fires something like 600 rounds a minute.
An indiscriminate shooting, all rooted in an ongoing dispute between two groups. We meet the police who tried to stop the murder from happening. It’s a combination of grief, revenge, anger, frustration, not knowing what else to do.
And we find out how one man went from doting brother to killer. They’re not thinking about the consequences from an emotional point of view, or the consequences from a legal point of view. They’re just thinking about getting the job done.
On the 2nd of January 2003, shots rang out at a party in Aston, Birmingham. Just after 4:00 a. m.
, a red Ford Mondeo turned into the alley at the back of the salon. The driver cut the headlights and the car moved slowly towards a group of people standing outside the party. As the Mondeo approached, witnesses noticed the windows were halfway down.
Its occupants opened fire with a Mac-10 submachine gun and two 9-mm pistols. It doesn’t even appear as if they’ve aimed at an individual. They’ve just indiscriminately sprayed bullets into a crowd of individuals.
Chaos ensued as party-goers ran for cover. When the panic had died down, the bodies of two young women were found lifeless on the street.
Leticia walked outside and she was shot four times. One of those bullets went straight in her heart and through her back. What killed her instantly.
Teenagers Charlene Ellis and Leticia Shakespeare were the innocent victims of this seemingly motiveless shooting. Charlene died from a head wound and Leticia was killed by the bullet which pierced her chest. They both certainly received a number of gunshot wounds.
Charlene Ellis received a number of gunshot wounds. She pretty much died on the spot. They received a number of bullets, entry and exit wounds.
We’re talking about a gun, the Mac-10, that fires something like 600 rounds a minute. Charlene and Leticia, they were 17 and 18 years old at the time they died and really had done nothing wrong. But you just don’t understand what you’re actually seeing.
You don’t understand why has this come to me? Why has this happened? And who’s done it?
The murder was carried out by four childhood friends, Nathan Martin, Marcus Ellis, Michael Gregory, and Rodriguez Sims. They were part of a group whose conflict with another rival gang had made the streets of Birmingham at that time a virtual war zone. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, parts of Birmingham were at the mercy of street gangs.
There’d certainly been an escalation in violence between groups of young men. There’d been tensions that had developed, grievances that had grown and evolved, and they led to acts of violence. That initially started where the weapon was a knife, but very quickly that turned into a firearm.
There were regular shootings. Birmingham was fast getting this reputation as the gun capital of the UK.
It was Nathan Martin who had orchestrated the brutal murder, and it seemed his motivation went way beyond gang warfare. This was personal. I understand the grief.
I understand the anger. But to want to take another life? Why?
Nathan Martin was born in 1978 in the Smethwick area of Birmingham. Typical sort of terraced housing, very residential. Nothing unique about it, just a normal street, normal house.
You wouldn’t think you were entering the house where the two sons were gangsters. He had a brother, Yohann, who Nathan was very close to. People said they were polite, quite quiet, kind.
They didn’t come from a rough upbringing.
In the part of Birmingham they called home, trouble was never far away. Birmingham has its deprived areas. Places like Lozells, Handsworth, and Erdington have always been deprived.
The people living in those areas had been to a certain extent ghettoized, and they were starting off at a disadvantage straight away merely by living in these areas. Opportunities were thin on the ground, and the neighborhood became home to two rival gangs. The A34 flyover is the dividing line in that dispute.
On the Handsworth side, home to the so-called Burger Bar Boys. On the other side of the road is Aston and the territory of the gang known as the Johnson Crew.
There was the violence which would often be about money, but would just as often be about something minor. It could be just simply the way somebody’s looked at somebody, or you know, has heard third or fourth hand that he said this about you, and it would lead to people being shot dead or being punished in some way. I remember being aware of it in the sense of seeing quite a few drive-by shootings, young boys being involved in murder, crime, killing people.
And you’re thinking, well, that’s only happening to those who are involved. Live by the sword, you die by the sword. There seems to be a draw towards gangs in many cities where you find higher levels of poverty, a lot of social disorganization, and people unable to find a group of friends and a positive path.
So they end up grouping together and trying to support each other through criminal activity rather than prosocial activity.
As they got older, Nathan and Yohann became involved in more and more trouble. They started getting naughty in their early teens because of the area they were born and brought up in, and the kind of environment they were around. They had no choice but to be somehow affiliated with these gangs.
I just don’t think there were the community figures there that were visible and accessible to them. They went to school, but there wasn’t really a model within schooling that would cater for the challenging issues that these young lads were having to manage. Their parents were working extremely hard just to make ends meet.
So this was a lifestyle that they saw that was a continuous struggle. Whereas on the other hand, they were seeing a different sort of lifestyle. A lifestyle where money could be made easily.
It was hard for Nathan and Yohann’s parents to watch their kids being drawn into a life of crime right on their doorstep. Their parents had moved out of an area when Nathan and Martin started really getting involved, particularly Yohann started getting involved in gangs and violence. They moved out further into the suburbs to get away from it.
Despite their parents’ best efforts, by their late teens, Nathan and Yohann became part of a close-knit group of friends within the infamous Burger Bar Boys. And it was often based on locality. These gang members were born and brought up there, and often it would also be a family link up to who got Nathan and Yohann being brothers.
When it came to the smaller crews, often it could be blood links, cousins, brothers. But more so it would just be very tight friends, went to the same school, live on the same street, parents know each other, that kind of thing.
Soon both boys were regularly involved in criminal activity. Working together enabled all of them to take bigger risks, to challenge others around them, to be feared, to be able to dominate. Nathan and Yohann would do whatever they needed to do that they felt they needed to do to survive, which often meant robbery, violence.
Yohann climbed the ranks quickly, and as his rank increased, so too did the violence of his crimes. People who are in gangs aren’t in gangs so they can play blackjack together. They’re in gangs because they want to commit crimes, and it seems like that was what the focus of this group was, ranging from petty theft and minor offenses all the way up to mass shootings.
Yohann had been involved in a number of crimes since being a teenager. A lot of violent crime. He had his own little clique, and he moved to quite a respected position, I suppose.
He was a face people knew. Nathan didn’t have that same reputation for violence or had been involved in the extent of violence that Yohann had been involved in. In April 2001, Yohann was sent to prison for two years for possession of a firearm.
The prison sentence proved to be a turning point for him. When he was released from prison, it seemed that Yohann wanted to change his life and leave behind his old ways. He decided that he was going to start a music promotion business.
Yohann wanted to escape the gang life and bring his brother with him. Him and his brother Nathan were looking to hold a music event over New Year. Clearly a bit of entrepreneurialism, and showing a willingness to do something lawful.
But Yohann could not escape his past. He had literally got some flyers made up for his upcoming concert at quite a major venue in Birmingham. And he was going around his local area, West Bromwich.
He was on the high street in the early evening where he suddenly came across two young women that he knew from the area. Yohann had no idea the women had connections to a rival gang, the Johnson Crew. One of the girls got in Yohann’s car, leaving the other on the street.
The other girl, she went and made a phone call to the leader of the local gang. She said, “Guess what? Not only is Yohann Martin here, but he’s speaking to one of our girls or one of the girls associated to your gang.”
She wanted to be sat in that car next to Yohann, and she made the phone call out of spite, but she made it knowing exactly what was going to happen. Within five minutes, the plan has been hatched and he’s been shot six times and he’s dead. As simple as that.
It didn’t need any more arranging. It was that quick, that brutal.
Yohann’s death hit Nathan hard. He was angry at the way in which his brother had been taken from him. So he took it upon himself to avenge his brother’s death.
December 2002, and Nathan Martin was reeling from the sudden and brutal murder of his brother, Yohann. The two brothers were close. They’d been to jail together.
They obviously were brothers. And I think again Nathan recognized the fact that my brother was about to change his life. Maybe I would have come along with him.
We had this great future together. Yes, there’ll be an element of grief, but also a huge amount of anger. Almost a how dare you.
For Nathan, it totally turned his life upside down, and I think he placed less of a value on his own life as a result. It’s sadness, it’s anger, and it’s revenge, and that will happen almost instantaneously.
Detective Andy Half was in charge of Yohann’s murder investigation. He desperately tried to persuade Nathan to let the investigation run its course and not seek vengeance. Trying to have that conversation to say, “Look, this is our job.
Let us get on with the investigation. Let us find those who are responsible and we’ll get them before the court and they can go to prison and that’s justice served.” Justice isn’t served any other way.
Nathan chose not to take Andy’s advice. The whole community was on edge. When someone’s been murdered, there’s a few responses.
There are people who are angry. There are people who are upset. People who knew this young boy were very angry.
So they decided that they were going to plan a revenge attack.
Yohann dying was a big deal as far as the Burger Bar Crew were concerned, but Nathan definitely would have been the guy who would have been the most emotionally driven to do this. He was the one who wanted revenge. It was like a blood, old-style, blood for blood type revenge, and his friends were going to facilitate for him.
It’s a combination of grief, revenge, anger, frustration, not knowing what else to do, but wanting to do something using violence against somebody else. They were that angry that they had no consideration for anyone. They went out with that mindset, that vision, that they were going to plan this attack.
Emboldened by his friends, Nathan started to prepare his retaliation. Intelligence was gathered, transport arranged, and weapons sourced. The car that was used on the 2nd of January came from Northampton that day or the day before.
They’d been armed with three weapons, we know that. An automatic weapon is difficult to get access to in the US, let alone in the UK where it’s very, very difficult to get these types of guns. So the fact that they particularly found this gun, found ammunition for it, and decided to use that as their way of killing somebody out of retaliation, shows that they went through extra steps and effort.
They enter into it knowing what’s likely to happen, but not thinking it through because they weren’t mature enough to understand and think through. You’ve got that herd mentality, we’re going to go and shoot somebody. And we’re going to go and do it now.
With everything they needed, they waited for a time to strike. It wasn’t long before the opportunity presented itself. New Year’s Day, 2003, there’d been a party at a place called RB’s in Solihull, which was seen as a kind of Burger Bar kind of territory.
And there was a lot of people there. It was a party 18-year-old Charlene Ellis and her friend Letisha Shakespeare were looking forward to. Letisha’s mom Marcia remembers the night as a big deal for her daughter.
She wasn’t one for going out. She’d go around to her friend’s house. There were about two occasions she went out.
She bought some nice pair of trousers. She bought two blouses because she couldn’t make up her mind which blouse to actually wear. So I says, “Well, buy two and then we can actually wear another one on another occasion.”
And we enjoyed the day. We came back home. And she says she’ll cook dinner.
The rice was perfect that day. And it was just kind of quiet, very quiet, before she decided that she wanted to go out.
It was advertised on the radio and the girls thought they’d go. There was some kind of garage group that were performing there that night. When I dropped her off, I looked back and I waved and I thought, “But you look very young, very innocent.”
And my heart kind of sunk to say, “Well, I don’t know if you should be going out.” And I made a phone call. I called her and I says, “Yeah, hi Teaz.
If you don’t want to go out, you don’t have to go out.” She didn’t have the look of “Great, I’m going out. I’m excited.”
But she says, “No, it’s okay.” She was in there, didn’t sound fabulous, but it was New Year, it was her first New Year as well.
Hours later, the party was underway and unknown to the girls, it was heaving with gang members, including the man Nathan believed killed his brother, Jermaine Carty of the Johnson Crew. People had seen him that evening at RB’s, where he’d taken the stage and by some accounts was taunting the Burger Bar Crew. They could see him kind of intimate and lift his jumper up to show that he’s got a gun.
This taunt was all the Burger Bar boys needed. Information that Jermaine was there was circulated to Nathan. They were patrolling the streets.
They were looking for somebody to shoot up. Quite clearly, because you don’t drive around the streets with two handguns and an automatic weapon without wanting to use them.
As Nathan set off in the Ford Mondeo he bought the day before, party-goers, including Jermaine as well as Leticia and Charlene, made their way to an afterparty. There was an afterparty which was held at a hairdresser’s in Birmingham. Again, where this hairdresser’s was located was almost on the boundary between Burger Bar and Johnson territory.
This afterparty was advertised and known to me that they were going, but being young, that’s what you do. You go out to explore. So they all decided to move on to this afterparty.
People started making their way towards the party. There must have been more than 100 people there or so. The last thing she said to me was, “Well, Mom, I don’t know if I’m coming home tonight.”
Implying that if they’re having a great time, she’ll text me and say, “Is it okay if she can stay with her friends?” So that was the last time I saw her.
In the early hours of the 2nd of January, unaware of the fact that Nathan and his accomplices were on their way to confront Jermaine, Charlene and Letitia stepped outside. The way it’s situated, it’s down a kind of service road where another service road kind of backs onto it. Quite a small premises, kind of got a roll-up shutter at the back.
And come about 4:00 in the morning, people were beginning to sort of leave. I remember it was quite kind of drizzly weather. They got a bit hot.
They got bothered. And then they decided that they were going to go outside for some fresh air. Jermaine Carty was also outside at that time.
As the party spilled outside, Nathan and his friends arrived. If they’re in a group together, it makes it that much either easier to do something that they don’t want to do or harder to say no. And this is called groupthink.
So if somebody is leading a group and the rest of the group is going along with it, it makes it even harder for an outlier to say no or to stop themselves from what they do. There’s no break. There’s nobody in that car saying, “Hang on a minute.
Can we just do a risk assessment on this and think about the consequences?” That just doesn’t come into play. It’s that hue and cry, “Come on, let’s do it, lads.”
And it’s done.
Rodrigo Sims, an accomplice of Nathan’s, was in charge of spotting their target. It was an execution that they went out on this night. They organized that someone was inside of this party unknown to the girls.
That as soon as they saw their target, that they made a phone call. The time when they made the phone call, the exact time, the young person walked outside, and so did the young girls. All of a sudden, a red Mondeo car with its lights off slowly draws people’s attention as it sort of comes past the premises.
And then without any kind of warning, two of the windows come down. Shots are fired. They shot aiming towards Jermaine Carty and another associate of his.
Some people say Jermaine Carty and others deliberately run towards or use the girls as cover. Others say it was just an instinctive thing. Well, they’re not going to shoot at girls, surely.
But the fact is they were using a Mac-10, which even the most skilled military marksman isn’t easy to control. It’s known as the spray and pray. They just indiscriminately sprayed bullets into a crowd of individuals.
Two handguns and semi-automatic, almost like a little machine gun, just sprayed into the crowd without a care as to where the bullets went, who it hit, what damage it caused, complete lack of consequence. Nobody in that car seemingly had a problem with shooting bullets into a crowd like they did. And if they didn’t have a problem with it, they weren’t brave enough to stand up.
At some point, adrenaline took over. And there was a chain reaction that you can’t stop. The momentum has built.
And once that momentum and energy has built, it’s very difficult to stop it. They were literally cut to shreds by the bullets. They stood no chance at all.
Leticia was shot four times, straight in her heart and through her back, what killed her instantly.
On the 2nd of January, four childhood friends, Nathan Martin, Marcus Ellis, Rodrigo Sims, and Michael Gregory had brutally shot two teenage girls, Charlene Ellis and Leticia Shakespeare. The lives of two innocent girls were taken. And the price of life means nothing.
It was just two girls who were out having a night out, and their lives were snatched away. Following the shooting, Nathan and his accomplices fled the scene, ignorant to the devastation they had caused. They actually drove to the end of the street and started to gun salute as they had achieved something.
That speaks volumes. There’s no remorse, there’s no panic. They’re almost owning their actions that they’re proud of them.
They have avenged their friend. And that is about as simple as that. It’s not “Oh my goodness, we’ve just killed an individual.”
We’ve just done what we needed to do.
Within minutes of the shooting, somebody would have called them up, somebody would have told them that “Guess what? You’ve shot two girls dead.” What would have gone through their minds at the time?
I’m not sure. I don’t think it was their intention to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 girls, but having said that, I don’t think they would have lost much sleep over it either. It was just collateral damage.
They were there. In that party, there were members of the opposing group. So if you get caught up in that, so be it.
And that’s where it comes down to what is the value of life placed on these people. And it’s more about getting away with it then. So it’ll be a panic of “Are we going to get away with this?”
But not necessarily about the loss of life. They might have even felt it was to a certain extent a failed operation. They didn’t 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 anybody that they had set out to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 or injure.
Instead, they had killed and injured people that they I’m sure they had never set out to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. And on top of that now, obviously, the fact that they’ve killed two girls means that the heat is on.
Within hours of the shooting, Nathan and his friends began to cover their tracks. A few hours later, the car was found burnt out a number of miles away from the scene of the shooting. The next time the red Mondeo was heard of was at 10:06 when the fire brigade was called to a community center in Birmingham.
The gun was never found. The Mac-10 was never found to this day.
On the morning of the 2nd of January, Marcia Shakespeare was woken abruptly. There was banging on my front door. I looked, I got up, looked at the window to ask who is it?
What do you want? Because it’s in the morning. There was two strange people at my door.
A man and a woman. The man I’ve never seen before, the woman I never seen before. They were relatives of others who’d been injured in the shooting.
The man was trying to explain to me that there’s been an incident. I says, “What incident?” They came in.
I said, “What’s the matter?” And he was saying the girls were at the hospital. At that point I said to them, “Can I have a lift because I can’t drive.
I just feel a bit nervous.” It was dark. Nobody was on the road.
It was taking a long time to get to a 10-minute journey. I ran in, saw the receptionist, and I says to her, “I’m Leticia’s mum. I need to see Leticia.”
And she says, “You need to wait over there.” And I got anxious again and I says, “No, I need to see Leticia. I heard she’s in the hospital.”
She said, “No. Someone’s going to come. You need to go to the waiting room.”
So at that point when I heard waiting room, I went straight back to casualty. Thinking waiting room, waiting room means something’s happened, something seriously happened.
Then the doctor came into the room. And the doctor said, “You’re Leticia’s mum?” I said, “Yeah.”
He sat beside me, stroked my hand. And he says, “Just to let you know Leticia’s been shot. Leticia’s dead.”
Marcia had to do something she never thought she would have to, identify her daughter’s body. That point you think well, it’s not going to be your child. It’s some mistaken ID.
Shot. You know, trying to process everything what they’re trying to say to me. There’s a police officer on the side.
He said, “No touching.” As I’m coming to the room, Leticia was on what I thought was a table. She was just on this bed table.
She was there. And I ran and I could feel her on her face and she was still warm. And I’m thinking, “Well, she’s not dead because she’s still warm.”
And I walked around in front of her. And then when I looked, her eyes were wide open. Never seen her eyes as wide open like that.
That unbelievable moment where you think these things don’t happen to just ordinary people. Because we were just ordinary people trying to live.
The immediate aftermath of the shooting was huge. With the identity of the dead girls now revealed, the police search for answers continues. And vehicles here at the murder scene are being taken away for closer inspection.
While on the streets of Birmingham tonight, the threat of gun crime remains. This is the first time where all four victims were girls. Which really changed the landscape because it had almost become acceptable that a young lad would shoot and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 another young lad.
But when it’s a girl, it suddenly became very different. For Leticia’s family, this was their first chance to say goodbye. To bear witness against the futility and tragedy of their loss.
And still overwhelmed by the shock. To leave and go home and ask themselves repeatedly, as many are in this community, why such cruel, callous, and senseless violence should have robbed them of a young girl with her life before her.
Now, it’s two girls. It’s national headlines. It’s international headlines.
Politicians are talking about this. Should we have done that? There’s possibly some of that kind of feeling.
There would have been a lot of activity going on behind the scenes of how they were going to get away with this because it was more likely that they weren’t going to get away with it because innocent people were killed. And that’s what would have been at the forefront of their minds in those days. With the eyes of the nation upon them, police faced a desperate struggle to bring in those responsible for the brutal killings.
At first, physical evidence was scant. CCTV back in the early 2000s wasn’t great. They’d show you an incident, but you couldn’t necessarily identify anybody from them.
There wasn’t any kind of hard DNA to link anybody with the car. The car had been burnt out. That was the last you heard of the shooting as far as knowing who did it was concerned or what had happened.
Any DNA evidence was destroyed, but a spent cartridge case from the Mac-10 machine gun and the remains of a bullet from a 9-mm handgun were found. Weeks later, some forensics were gleaned from the car. There were some firearms residue, bullet casings, etc.
But very little evidence overall.
To make matters worse, investigators were unable to crack the hold the gangs had on the community. People were in fear. So nobody wanted to talk about it.
Taking down their barriers after carefully examining the scene, the police say they now have a clearer picture of what happened, but they still need more witnesses to come forward. Despite clear revulsion at the crime and the offer now of 85,000 pounds in rewards for information, few are coming forward. And those that are are doing so anonymously.
There were people there that saw and became blind and heard and became deaf. When we see people in the community refusing to speak, and we’ve seen it in many similar cases, it’s usually due to two things. One, not being seen to be a grass, and two, absolute fear.
Because they know that if they speak to the police or speak to anybody, their lives are at risk. So there’s a palpable tension and fear in the community.
The gang had closed ranks and the killers gone to ground. It was an open secret in the community that Nathan and his friends were involved. Police just needed to prove it.
Word on the street very quickly identified the killers to people on the street, not necessarily to the police. But a lot of people on the streets of Birmingham and West Bromwich knew exactly who had pulled the trigger and why. Nathan was declared as a person of interest.
Nathan doesn’t get charged, he gets released on bail and stays on bail for many months. He may have been feeling relief. People weren’t speaking.
There’s going to be very little evidence. And at that point, he would have felt invincible. However, there would have been still that underlying panic of what if?
From the outside, there may have been a look of bravado. I’ve got this. I’m invincible.
Nobody’s going to take me down. But at the same time, knowing that this has got such attention and that girls were killed, so the police are not going to be letting this go. So that definitely would have been inside what was going on with him.
It took months for police to make any progress. The candles have long been extinguished. The floral tributes are fading, as it seems are any hopes of a fast resolution to this double killing.
They may have good intelligence. They may have strong suspicions, but what they haven’t got is evidence about who the killers are. It was a very long and complex investigation.
People weren’t charged for up to months, even a year later. On the 13th of November, 2003, investigators finally had enough evidence to charge Nathan, Marcus, Rodrigo, and Michael. Four men aged 19, 22, 23, and 24, all from the Birmingham area, were each charged last night with two murders and three attempted murders.
There was also CCTV where they could place the car. So they identified the car that was involved in the drive-by shooting. They could also track where that car had been bought.
They could link that to Nathan. Police also tracked calls made on mobile phones, which proved Nathan and his accomplices were in the area at the time of the killing. By the end of this investigation, they had an abundance of evidence.
Police had their killer. They just needed a conviction, but that wasn’t going to be easy.
There was no pleading, there was no tears, there was no remorse. On the 9th of November, 2004, after months of waiting, Leticia and Charlene’s killers finally appeared in court. So ruthless are the gangs involved in this case that not only was the court guarded by armed police, but extraordinary measures were taken to protect those witnesses who did take the stand.
There were some witnesses that were protected that were anonymous witnesses, and people outside the courtroom in Handsworth and Lozells, through sometimes through process of elimination almost, would target people that they thought were these anonymous witnesses, or they thought were related to these anonymous witnesses. And actually there was a couple of shootings, and the reason for that was to see, well, does that same witness now take the stand tomorrow? If we shot him the night before, and we’ve got the right person, he won’t be taking the stand tomorrow.
Or if we’ve shot his brother correctly, chances are he probably won’t want to take the stand anymore. They thought they had the power. The power to control the streets.
To bully, to intimidate, to harm. At no cost.
In court, Nathan and the other suspects remained silent. They did not want to take any responsibility for their actions because they didn’t think it was wrong. And it’s just made it even harder for this grieving community to see because they thought this was just absolutely the peak of reprehensible behavior.
The defendants said nothing, essentially. They looked straight ahead of themselves, they occasionally would acknowledge their supporters in the public gallery. Most of them said no comment from the moment they were arrested to the moment they were convicted.
Well, they didn’t plea. I suppose they automatically thought that they were innocent. They didn’t care about life.
It was collateral damage. It was something that happened. They see life as generally as less valuable because when you see life taken so easily all around you continuously, it becomes that life is less valuable.
Death, dying, violence, serious assaults are so common that it means that life isn’t as valuable as most of us think. Well, no remorse. There’s no remorse whatsoever.
No remorse to say, well, we’ve done something wrong and I feel a bit bad about it.
One of the few times Nathan spoke was to berate the police and the public for what he saw as a great injustice. Nathan Martin, when he took the dock during his trial, said, “My brother was killed and nobody cared. Where was the media and the appeals then?
Just because he was seen as a gang member, just because he came from the wrong area.” This comes down to a psychological theory, deserving and undeserving victims. The general public see a victim that they consider almost deserving, there’s not as much attention.
It’s not that they deserve it, but if you live in that life and you get injured, well, so be it. Whereas when there’s innocent children involved, they are put into the category of undeserving victim, which means it gets more media attention, which means it gets more shock from the general public.
With anonymous witness statements and the physical evidence that was available, the prosecution was able to present their case to the jury. I spent six months in court. Which is a very long time.
Backs and forwards. Different types of evidence. DNA, telephone evidence.
Witness statements, anonymity. Quite a lot of information. Relying heavily on mobile phone records, the prosecution showed that Martin, Ellis, and Gregory had been in the Mondeo and Sims had been the spotter.
He stood near the party, guiding the murder car into its target. The jury were convinced of their guilt. On the 18th of March 2005, the four men were sentenced to a total of 132 years behind bars.
Their families cheered in court today as the first of the guilty verdicts was read out. They now want to move on with their lives as best they can. The convicted killers are planning appeals.
West Midlands police are still fighting the culture of gangs and guns in Birmingham.
I knew that when the day came that there was going to be sentencing that day. The verdict was going to happen. Just felt it.
And when it did come it was just tears. These four individuals are in prison for 35 years. If they were 20, they’re going to be 55 before they can apply for parole.
35 years is just a lesson. And when I mean lesson, it’s a lesson to enable the young people involved to actually rehabilitate. When it comes to myself, when it comes to the other two mothers, we have the life sentence.
So theirs is quite minor in regards. It’s as if you’ve been scarred and you can’t actually see that scar, but that scar is there.
The case became a catalyst for change on the streets of Birmingham. After the shooting, there were other shootings, but the actual structure of the gang really, or both gangs really, was dismantled by the police in a very systematic way. They really went after the top tier of the gangs and shootings fell dramatically.
But to this day, the culture of violence still remains. That was an over. It was just the beginning.
Violent crime hadn’t gone away. Whilst for Nathan, the motivation for these merciless killings seems obvious, to this day, how he became able to release the killer within so readily isn’t clear. I suspect that the killer within evolved as a consequence of everything that was happening at the time.
Their involvement in the gang, they just weren’t able to manage themselves without recourse to violence. And of course, there was nobody there to help them, show them the way. It evolved within the gang, which has then manifest itself into they become monsters.
Or perception is they become monsters.
My parents always used to say to us, “Oh, the good always die young.” And you think, yeah, you know. And for to die at such a very young age was life-changing for all of us.
It wasn’t just the fact of just me. It was the whole family. What they did was cold.
It was calculated. And it was evil. The lives of innocent girls snatched away.
They’re horrible, nasty, psychopathic offenders. But at the same time, they were created. Nathan, clearly, he is a young man that got involved with a gang that was involved in criminality, 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 trafficking, that got involved with conflict with other gangs.
Was he a monster or was he somebody who lost his way? I don’t know. Probably a blend of both.
We don’t know. Bubbly. Smiley.
Always smiling. Always willing to help people. And that was our hardest thing about when it came to losing Leticia.
How innocent she was. Her eyes were innocent. She was innocent.
