'He was fun, cheeky, full of life'

On the morning of 27 November 2000, Tunde Taylor dropped his 10-year-old brother Damilola at his primary school in Peckham, south London. It was the last time he would see him alive; later that day two boys attacked Damilola and he died. There was nothing Tunde, who was on his way home to the north Peckham estate from work at the time, could have done. Yet for 26 years he has blamed himself. “I feel I should have done more,” he says. “I’ve carried that guilt for a long time.”

Tunde was 21 when his brother died. The Taylor family had only been in the UK for three months and the weather was turning, so “I had taken Damilola to buy a jacket at Primark in Peckham. He chose a silver one.” Damilola wears that silver jacket in the security camera footage taken outside Peckham Library at 4.51pm. He is skipping across the tarmac, caught forever in a moment of boyish exuberance. Minutes later he was stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle which severed his femoral artery, causing catastrophic bleeding.

As we hear in the desperately moving documentary Damilola: the Untold Story, the schoolboy spent his final minutes on a concrete stairwell, cradled by estate repairman Guillermo Casal.

Today violence continues to take its toll on young people. In 2000, the public mood was that such a thing could not be allowed to happen again. Then, as now, there were calls to address social issues in deprived communities like Peckham. Tunde’s father Richard and mother Gloria launched the Damilola Taylor Trust, a charity committed to supporting young people who are “susceptible to gang and knife crime”.

But somewhere in the furore the likeable boy who dreamt of being a doctor and wrote poetry was crowded out. “When you hear about Damilola, it’s always about the murder but not about the little boy that he really was,” says Tunde. “Damilola could have a conversation with anyone, people found him very likeable. He was fun, cheeky, full of life.”

The documentary continues the work of the 2016 BBC drama Damilola: Our Beloved Boy, which went some way to portraying the real boy, but also reveals the trauma of Tunde and Damilola’s friends including Star Wars actor John Boyega and his sister Grace. Eight years old at the time, Boyega reveals how profoundly Damilola’s death affected his childhood. He withdrew to his bedroom to draw and play with his Power Rangers, though later he would find his voice and a channel for his talent at Theatre Peckham.

It’s always about the murder and not about the boy Damilola was

The Taylors hadn’t chosen Peckham. They were staying in west London (where the family had lived in the late 1970s and Damilola’s siblings Tunde and Gbemi were born) so Gbemi, 22, could be treated for epilepsy. On a visit to a relative on the estate, Gbemi was admitted to a nearby hospital and the entire family moved to be close to her.

Damilola’s father Richard had stayed in Nigeria, where he worked for the Government. Tunde, who had been studying political science in Lagos, had to take on the responsibility of looking after his brother. “I got a job in a sports shop in Oxford Street. I was trying to be the man of the house.”

In Lagos, the family home had a compound, now they were on an estate with walkways and dank stairwells patrolled by a gang of teenage and pre-teen criminals called the Young Peckham Boys. Two gang members, brothers Danny and Ricky Preddie (12 and 13 at the time of the killing), would be found guilty of Damilola’s manslaughter in 2006 and sentenced to eight years in prison, after two previous trials had failed due to an unreliable witness and missing forensic evidence.

The gang had been hanging around Damilola’s primary school bullying children, and Damilola spoke back to them. The two boys, who John Boyega calls “twisted, violent youths”, attacked when Damilola came back from the library.

Ten days after his death, on what would have been Damilola’s 11th birthday, a memorial service was held in a Peckham church. Film survives of Tunde addressing his dead brother. “Please forgive me,” he says, shellshocked by grief. “I am deeply sorry for not being there for you.” Tunde’s guilt was compounded by Richard Taylor’s fury. “My dad was very angry with my mum and me for the loss of Damilola,” he says. “That was very evident throughout the years.” Gloria Taylor died, aged 57, in 2008 after a heart attack. “The loss of Damilola affected her health,” Tunde says. “She was carrying a lot of pain and eventually she had to rest.”

Richard became a public figure, receiving an OBE for his work and died in 2024. Tunde has avoided publicity, instead concentrating on living his life, working in the City, marrying and becoming the father of two girls, now two and four. “I have a sense of having to protect them at all times,” he says.

Despite the best efforts of the Damilola Taylor Trust, of which Tunde is now Chair of the Board of Trustees, there remains much to protect children from. “Every time I hear about another young person losing their life it breaks my heart, another family is beginning the same journey that we went through,” he says. “But that’s where I find purpose. We may not be able to solve everything but I’m trying to find my own way by keeping Damilola’s legacy alive.”

Damilola's story lives on

Dr Leroy Logan on turning this tragedy into a “message of hope”

Dr Leroy Logan, a Trustee of the Damilola Taylor Trust, former police superintendent and chairman of the Black Police Association, led a team of Black officers who went door-to-door on the North Peckham estate after initial enquiries met “a wall of silence”.

“There were homes that looked on to the area where Damilola was attacked but lack of trust in police meant residents were not open to co-operating with the homicide team. My officers could knock at the door, speak in their West African languages.”

There was also a personal connection; Logan had known Damilola’s parents Richard and Gloria Taylor in the 1970s. This only added to his horror when he heard a boy had been killed. “I was devastated. I couldn’t believe it was their son,” he says. “Dammy was streetwise for Lagos, but he wasn’t streetwise for London, especially an urban Peckham that was being terrorised by young thugs.”

If that paints a dismal picture of London, Logan – who was played by real-life friend of Damilola, John Boyega, in the BBC drama Small Axe – is not dismayed.

“Knife crime and violence is still an issue today, even though violent crime is going down all over the country,” he says. “But we can still turn Damilola’s story into a message of hope. If a 10-year-old boy could have such aspirations to be a doctor, to change the world, then none of us have an excuse not to try.”