Murder of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare

Last updated

Murder of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare
LocationBirchfield Road, Aston, Birmingham, England
Date2 January 2003 (2003-01-02)
Attack type
 Drive-by shooting
Weapons MAC-10 machine pistol
Deaths2
Injured2
PerpetratorMarcus Ellis, Michael Gregory, Nathan Martin, Rodrigo Simms
MotiveRevenge for the murder of Yohanne Martin

Two teenage girls, Charlene Ellis, 18, and Letisha Shakespeare, 17, were shot with a MAC-10 machine pistol, outside a hair salon in Birchfield Road, Aston, Birmingham, England, as they were leaving a party in the early hours of 2 January 2003, in a gang-related drive-by shooting. [1] [2] Shakespeare and Ellis were described as "best friends" and "innocent victims". [3]

Charlene's twin sister Sophie, cousin Cheryl Shaw and a friend, Leon Harris, were also injured. Shaw was shot in the hand. [3]

The shooting, investigated by the West Midlands Police under its new Chief Constable, Paul Scott-Lee, was part of a feud between two Birmingham gangs, the "Johnson Crew" and the "Burger Bar Boys", and was in response to the murder of Yohanne Martin, a Burger Bar Boys associate. [4]

Four men were each convicted of murder and attempted murder at Leicester Crown Court in March 2005. Marcus Ellis, 24 (Charlene's half-brother), Michael Gregory, 22, and Nathan Martin, 26 (brother of Yohanne [4] ), were jailed for a minimum of 35 years. Rodrigo Simms, 20, was sentenced to 27 years – the lesser figure being due to his age at the time of the shooting. [5] The trial was the first in England at which secret witnesses were allowed to be used. [4] In 2005, the convicted men appealed at Woolwich Crown Court but the appeal was turned down. [4] They were also refused leave to appeal to the House of Lords. [4] In 2012, Ellis, Martin and Simms appealed to the European Court of Human Rights that they had not received a fair trial. This appeal was also dismissed. [4]

The mothers of the two dead women, Marcia Shakespeare and Beverley Thomas, have since actively campaigned against gun crime and gangs. [3] They set up the 'Letisha and Charlene Education Awards', administered by the Birmingham & Black Country Community Foundation, a registered charity, [6] in 2006. [4] In December 2016 it was announced that Marcia Shakespeare had been appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours. [7]

In 2018, Libera, an Italian association that promotes outreach activities and various types of protest action against organised crime, remembered Letisha and Charlene among other nearly 900 names of innocent victims of organised crime during the 23rd Day of Remembrance and Commitment. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aston Villa F.C.</span> Association football club in Birmingham, England

Aston Villa Football Club is a professional football club based in Aston, Birmingham, England. The club, founded in 1874, compete in the Premier League, the top tier of English football. The team have played at their home ground, Villa Park, since 1897. Aston Villa are one of the oldest and most successful clubs in England, having won the Football League First Division seven times, the FA Cup seven times, the League Cup five times, and the European Cup and European Super Cup once.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Birmingham Six</span> Irishmen falsely convicted for the Birmingham pub bombings

The Birmingham Six were six Northern Irishmen who were each sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 following their false convictions for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. Their convictions were declared unsafe and unsatisfactory and quashed by the Court of Appeal on 14 March 1991. The six men were later awarded financial compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aston</span> Human settlement in England

Aston is an area of inner Birmingham, England. Located immediately to the north-west of Central Birmingham, Aston constitutes a ward within the metropolitan authority. It is approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from Birmingham City Centre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Birmingham pub bombings</span> 1974 IRA attack in England

The Birmingham pub bombings were carried out on 21 November 1974, when bombs exploded in two public houses in Birmingham, England, killing 21 people and injuring 182 others.

The West Midlands Serious Crime Squad was a police unit in the English West Midlands which operated from 1974 to 1989. It was disbanded after an investigation into allegations of incompetence and abuse of power on the part of some of the squad's members. Some of this misconduct resulted in wrongful convictions, including the high-profile case of the Birmingham Six. The sister Regional Crime Squad based at Bilston was responsible for the investigation of the Bridgewater Four.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">West Midlands Police</span> English territorial police force

West Midlands Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England.

Neil Entwistle is an English man convicted of murdering his American wife, Rachel, and their infant daughter, Lillian, on 20 January 2006, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, United States. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole and is incarcerated at Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Gang-related organised crime in the United Kingdom is concentrated around the cities of London, Manchester and Liverpool and regionally across the West Midlands region, south coast and northern England, according to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. With regard to street gangs the cities identified as having the most serious gang problems, which accounted for 65% of firearm homicides in England and Wales, were London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. Glasgow in Scotland also has a historical gang culture with the city having as many teenage gangs as London, which had six times the population, in 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Church of SS Peter & Paul, Aston</span> Church

The Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul in Witton Lane, Aston, Birmingham, England, is a parish church in the Church of England.

On 22 August 2007, Rhys Milford Jones, an eleven-year-old English boy, was murdered in Liverpool while walking home from football practice. Sean Mercer, aged 16 at the time of the shooting, went on trial on 2 October 2008, and was found guilty of murder on 16 December. Mercer was sentenced to life imprisonment serving a minimum of 22 years.

Sir Paul Joseph Scott-Lee KPM DL is a retired British police officer who served as Chief Constable of Suffolk Constabulary and West Midlands Police.

Aston Villa Hardcore is a football hooligan firm associated with the Premier League club Aston Villa, based in Birmingham, England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Ross Parker</span> 2001 murder of an English teenager

Ross Andrew Parker, from Peterborough, England, was a seventeen-year-old white English male murdered in an unprovoked racially motivated crime. He bled to death after being stabbed, beaten with a hammer and repeatedly kicked by a gang of British Pakistani men. The incident occurred in Millfield, Peterborough, ten days after the September 11 attacks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peaky Blinders</span> Criminal gang in Birmingham, England

The Peaky Blinders were a street gang based in Birmingham, England, which operated from the 1880s until the 1920s. The group consisted largely of young criminals from lower- to working-class backgrounds. They engaged in robbery, violence, racketeering, illegal bookmaking, and control of gambling. Members wore signature outfits that typically included tailored jackets, lapelled overcoats, buttoned waistcoats, silk scarves, bell-bottom trousers, leather boots, and peaked flat caps. Contrary to the television series of the same name, it is unlikely that they had razor blades sewn into these caps, instead gaining their name from the way they wore them with the cap tilted so that the peak covered one eye.

Events from 2014 in England

The shootings at the pub Vår Krog & Bar in Gothenburg happened on 18 March 2015. Two unidentified gunmen entered a pub in Gothenburg, Sweden and began firing indiscriminately at people inside the restaurant. The pub, Vår Krog & Bar, is located in the Biskopsgården neighbourhood of Gothenburg on Hisingen, an area that has witnessed gang violence. The shootings are one of the rare times in which an innocent bystander has been killed in criminal rival gang violence in Sweden. The shooters were part of a gang from North Biskopsgården out for revenge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lloyd House, Birmingham</span> Tower block in Birmingham, England

Lloyd House is the headquarters of the West Midlands Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing the West Midlands metropolitan county in the United Kingdom. The building also houses the office of the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner. Since 2017, it has also been the location of Birmingham Central Police Station.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leicester Law Courts</span> Judicial building in Leicester, England

The Leicestershire Law Courts is a Crown Court venue, which deals with criminal cases, as well as a County Court venue, which deals with civil cases, in Wellington Street, Leicester, England.

References

  1. ↑ "January 2003 interview re deaths of two black girls in Aston on BBC". Breakfast with Frost . BBC. 5 January 2003. Retrieved 26 March 2008.
  2. ↑ "Thrown in at the deep end". West Midlands Police. 21 July 2014. Archived from the original on 8 August 2014. Retrieved 21 July 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 Wilson, Peter (2 January 2013). "BBC News – Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis shootings: 10 years on". BBC Online . Retrieved 21 July 2014.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 McCarthy, Nick (January 2013). "New Year shootings: Letisha Shakespeare's mother reveals her living nightmare". Birmingham Mail . Retrieved 21 July 2014.
  5. ↑ "Four jailed for New Year killings". BBC Online . 21 March 2005. Retrieved 21 July 2014.
  6. ↑ "Birmingham & Black Country Community Foundation, registered charity no. 1048162". Charity Commission for England and Wales.
  7. ↑ "New Year Honours: Marcia Shakespeare and Karen Ross recognised". BBC Online . 30 December 2016. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  8. ↑ "Nomi da non dimenticare". 21 March 2018.

52°30′28″N1°54′09″W / 52.50767°N 1.90253°W / 52.50767; -1.90253


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.