Jerrell Elie: The dead boy at the centre of the row between Alan Yentob and MPs over closure of Kids Company
Many supporters of the charity believed the warning had been borne out following the murder of the 17-year-old in Brixton
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Your support makes all the difference.In a now notorious risk assessment drawn up by Kids Company’s safeguarding committee, and sent to the Cabinet Office before its closure, the charity warned that the closure of its services risked violence on the streets.
Many supporters of the charity believed the warning had been borne out following the murder of 17-year-old Jerrell Elie in Brixton, south London, this summer.
A regular visitor to Kids Company’s project in neighbouring Camberwell, Mr Elie was found dying of head injuries after he was hit by a car on the night of Saturday 8 August – the first weekend after Kids Company closed its doors. He died at the scene. Elie had just completed his GCSEs.
Police investigating the circumstances of his death have charged a 29-year-old man with his murder.
It is impossible to say with certainty at this stage what role Kids Company’s closure played in the tragic killing. The man accused of Jerrell’s murder will appear at the Old Bailey at the end of this month.
However, former Kids Company employees working with gangs in the area have said they feared the charity’s demise could result in such an incident, and it was this murder that Alan Yentob, the charity’s former chairman, raised with MPs in order to defend the organisation’s work on 15 October.
A former project worker told the Daily Mirror newspaper in August: “This is what we were afraid of. Our project worked with young people from all the different gang-affiliated areas. It made it hard for them to attack each other because of the respect they had for us.
“Now there are boys telling me, ‘Tom, it’s open season. Anything goes.’ We were the ones that used to take the knives off the boys.”
Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee chair Bernard Jenkin hit back at Mr Yentob’s claim during the evidence session. He said MPs had been told “by a very reputable source” that the murder – as well as suicides and stabbings said to have occurred in the wake of Kids Company’s closure – “occurred because kids no longer had money to pay their drug pushers…The breakdown in the flow of funds onto the streets has led to that violence.”
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