Murder of Rhys Jones

On the evening of 22 August 2007, eleven-year-old Rhys Milford Jones was fatally shot as he walked home from football practice across the car park of the Fir Tree public house on the Croxteth Park estate in Liverpool, England. He was struck by a bullet fired by a youth on a bicycle and, despite emergency treatment, was pronounced dead a short time later at Alder Hey Children's Hospital. He was five weeks short of his twelfth birthday and a keen footballer and Everton supporter.

Rhys was not the intended target. The shooting grew out of a long-running feud between two local gangs, the Croxteth Crew and the Norris Green Strand Crew. The gunman had gone looking for rival youths who had entered what his group regarded as its territory, and fired across the car park from a distance of about seventy yards while bystanders and moving cars were nearby. One of the shots hit Rhys as he passed.

The killing prompted a large public response and an extensive police investigation, including a televised reconstruction and repeated appeals for information. Rhys's parents, Stephen and Melanie Jones, made public appeals and later supported anti-gun campaigns; a funeral service was held at Liverpool Cathedral in September 2007.

Sean Mercer, who was sixteen at the time of the shooting and a member of the Croxteth Crew, was charged with murder. After a trial lasting several weeks at Liverpool Crown Court, he was convicted on 16 December 2008. The sentencing judge, Mr Justice Irwin, imposed the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment and set a minimum term of twenty-two years, reduced to twenty-one years and 122 days to reflect time already spent in custody. The judge described the offence as arising from gang conflict and noted the dignity shown by Rhys's family throughout the proceedings.

Several other men were convicted of assisting an offender for helping Mercer evade detection by destroying evidence and pressuring witnesses, among them James Yates, Melvin Coy, Gary Kays and Nathan Quinn; a further defendant, Dean Kelly, was convicted of related offences. James Yates's sentence was later increased on appeal. A number of relatives of those involved were subsequently convicted of perverting the course of justice.

In the years that followed, Rhys was widely remembered in Liverpool. A community centre named in his memory opened on the Croxteth Park estate in 2013, and his family continued to campaign against gun and gang violence. The case remains one of the most prominent examples of the harm caused by gang-related firearms offences in the city.