Tim Pritchard - Street Boys - 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood

She ran up to the policeman holding Naja and shouted in his face.

‘What’s he done? He wasn’t doin’ nufin’. He was just standing on the block.’

‘He was caught selling drugs. Now go away before I arrest you too.’

Chantelle just stood there shouting at the policeman, telling him to let her little brother go.

JaJa had left Wandsworth prison and was on his way back to Angell Town to meet the others. He was just congratulating himself that he wasn’t doing the drug selling shift at Marston House on such a cold day when he got a call from his mother.

‘The police have raided Marston House. They’ve taken Naja.’

She sounded frantic.

JaJa ran home. Naja was his younger brother and for years, ever since they were tiny kids, JaJa had been given the task of looking after him. His father had beaten up his mother and to stay alive she’d had to take her kids away from the family home. Since then, JaJa had taken the role of the man in the house and, although he’d been in and out of prison, he was expected to keep his younger brother out of trouble.

That’s why, when JaJa got home, his mother was furious with him.

‘They’ve taken Naja to Brixton police station. It’s your fault. You’re supposed to be looking after him.’

JaJa tried to remain calm. He knew that when he’d left the other members of the PDC earlier that day at Marston House none of them had any guns on them and the amount of gear they had could be passed off as drugs for their own use. He wasn’t worried. He believed they’d all be able to get off.

The doorbell rang. JaJa went to answer it. Standing in the hallway were three police officers.

‘Elijah Kerr. We are arresting you on suspicion of supplying class A drugs.’

JaJa wasn’t worried. I don’t have any drugs on me. I don’t have any in the flat. They can’t get me for nothing . He treated the whole thing like a joke.

‘I’ve done nufin’ wrong. You can’t pin anything on me.’

‘That’s what you think.’

‘Shut it. You’ve got nufin’ on me.’

The policemen just laughed in his face and took him away.

When he got to Brixton police station the others, including Naja, Phat Si, Ribz, Skippy and Sykes, were all there, being held in separate cells. The police were still laughing and joking around.

JaJa shouted at the others through the cell bars.

‘We’re goin’ home, don’t worry, man. They ain’t got nufin’ on us.’

But no matter how much confidence he showed, how chilled he felt, the policemen around him still seemed to react with delight whenever he protested that they were clean.

Locked in their cells, JaJa and the others banged on pipes and yelled at each other through the bars, in a potent mixture of excitement and trepidation.

‘We’ll be out of here soon.’

The police yelled back telling them to shut up.

Late that night they took JaJa into an interview room. He knew what was going on. He’d been through the same process many times before. He wasn’t worried. But when he saw the TV screen and the video camera he knew something bad was about to go down.

The investigating officer pulled out a small videotape and put it in the camcorder. He turned on the television. JaJa looked on in amazement as the screen flickered into life to reveal a shot of the balcony of Marston House. It showed figures walking up and down the second-floor landing handing over small bags and collecting money from punters. The tapes went back a whole month. JaJa cursed himself. He’d felt that something had been up for several weeks but he’d never reacted to it properly. He now realized that the police had inserted undercover surveillance teams into the empty flats in Marston House and its neighbouring blocks and had `secretlyhad `secretly videotaped them for weeks. JaJa had the sort of flash of insight that only occurs under extreme pressure.

That’s money for you. It’s the risk. It makes you do stupid things. Sometimes when you’re on the street you need it so much it blinds you. Even from obvious things .

When Ribz was taken into the interview room and shown the same videotapes he protested. The tapes they had on him only showed him walking up and down the stairs in Marston House. They didn’t show him actually selling drugs. But the cops had a surprise for him. When they tested his fingers they were stained with a special ink. Undercover officers had bought drugs from him using marked notes. Ribz knew then that he would have to admit his guilt. I’m bang to rights .

Back in his cell JaJa thought about the effect it would have on the others. It was Phat Si he felt most sorry for. Naja, Sykes and Ribz were young offenders so they’d probably get a year in some young offenders’ institution. Skippy had only ever received minor convictions. JaJa had managed to stay out of prison for a couple of years so the court might be lenient on him. But Phat Si had just come out of a long prison sentence. He’d been suspected of attempted murder but, in the end, was found guilty of firing a gun into a crowd. He’d only been out a matter of weeks and now he was going back in again. The only good thing was that somehow Inch had slipped the police net.

As soon as he’d got out of Angell Town and onto the Brixton Road after the police raid, Inch knew that he was on the run and he wasn’t sure where it would end. From Brixton Road he fled to his girl’s place. He had to avoid the ‘feds’. He was panicking. Fucking hell. At least JaJa isn’t nicked. That makes it better . He had no idea that, at that very moment, JaJa was also being led in handcuffs to Brixton police station. He didn’t tell his girlfriend what was going on but he knew that she realized that something was up.

She could see the way I was and I knew I can’t get nicked but I was stuck and I couldn’t think properly, innit? It was crazy, man. I was thinking of getting out of the country. I was dumb, I should have breezed but I was too scared. I thought no way am I going to the airport. What if they nick me there? I’ll be mad .

Inch called some of his friends, who told him not to worry and tried to calm him down. He decided then that he would hang out and stay with friends in different places. That way he would never be in one place for too long. That way the police wouldn’t be able to track him down.

It would be two months before he was caught.

A month after the Marston House raid, Ribz, Sykes and Naja were taken to the Inner London Crown Court in Camberwell and sentenced, under their real names, Byron Cole, aged 19, Michael Payne, aged 21 and Naja Kerr, aged 18, to twenty-one months in Feltham. Later that same day, Skippy aka Errol Cole, aged 23, was given three and a half years. Phat Si and JaJa, real names, Simon Maitland and Elijah Kerr, both aged 22, got three years and nine months.

By the time he got out two years later, Elijah Kerr, aka JaJa, was a changed man. But the world outside had also changed. Marston House, the council block he’d grown up in, had been demolished to make way for brand new, award-winning housing. The Angell Town estate had been redeveloped. Brixton had been yuppified. Britain had gone to war in Iraq.

Within three months of his release, JaJa’s fellow PDC gang members Blacker, Ham and Justyn would be gunned down in the streets around Brixton. Phat Si would be shot in the leg outside JaJa’s flat. A new, radical Islam would be preached on the streets outside JaJa’s local mosques in Stockwell and Brixton. Four suicide bombers would kill scores of people in the heart of London. An innocent Brazilian would be shot in the head at the local tube station. Things were changing, and changing fast.