A life cut short: The shooting of Lathanial Burrell

After a bit of chat about pub quizzes, questionable general knowledge, and why some people should never be trusted with a quiz answer sheet, we turn to a story that is anything but light.

In March 2025, 16-year-old Lethanial Burrell was shot dead on his own street in Stockwell, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. What followed was the unravelling of a calculated attack involving a stolen moped, a modified firearm, and a network far bigger than it first appeared.

This episode looks at who Lethanial was, what happened on Paradise Road, and the wider questions his death leaves behind about exploitation, violence, and the systems that failed to stop it.

Sources in this episode include:

https://news.met.police.uk/news/two-found-guilty-of-murder-following-stockwell-shooting-505941
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8e70g57d2xo
https://www.cps.gov.uk/london-north/news/two-convicted-murder-16-year-old-shot-south-london
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5752jpz5po
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/05/teenager-shot-dead-in-south-london-named-as-lathaniel-burrell
https://www.itv.com/news/london/2025-03-06/this-cant-happen-to-anyone-else-says-aunt-of-boy-shot-dead-in-south-london
https://hounslowherald.com/yearold-charged-with-murder-of-lathaniel-burrell-in-stockwell-p27553-249.htm
https://news.sky.com/story/second-person-charged-with-murder-after-shooting-of-teenage-boy-in-south-london-13326917
https://southwarknews.co.uk/area/peckham/teenager-from-peckham-arrested-over-shooting-of-16-year-old-in-stockwell/
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/two-guilty-murder-stockwell-shooting-b1269986.html
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/stockwell-shooting-london-latest-victim-police-update-murder-121341630.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGEZC2Yl4PFFaM_0HkI3z6C7xWu5TWTMGgO0bS1XUTknm0DhxMjN0dJOEQTlMh5XtvTudJ46xpzJirwZ2_h6hZIGaK6M4or6xZja26LFroWAxPVQr1b7ucd0zRkUzwTw7XtQoKvFYpV3VanHPCzuZQYUY9juEwqEX67YKBEdzcDB
https://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/news/25039283.lathaniel-burrell-stockwell-shooting-two-arrests/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c871el85x02o
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iUeaVe5NOwc
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/stockwell-shooting-lathaniel-burrell-murder-arrest-b1215371.html

Transcript

Ep 27 - Lathaniel Burrell

Hello. Hi. I'm Rachel.

I'm Hannah. And this is the Sinister South podcast, a podcast all about the nefarious underbelly of South London. I haven't had nefarious for a while.

That's what I thought. I bring it back. It's been a hot minute since we had it.

Well done, darling. So there we go. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. How are you? I'm okay. Good.

Yeah. Won a quiz. You won a quiz.

I was so happy. I was so proud of you. When you messaged me, just me and Mitch as well in our local and we weren't going to do it.

We were walking to the co-op. Right. And we're like, oh, we'll stop and have one.

And then we're having a Guinness because we hadn't had a Guinness on St. Patrick's Day. I see. So we stopped and had a Guinness and we were then obviously they're very attentive in our local.

Another one. Yeah. All right.

Then we're sitting there chatting on our third beer and Mitch was like, oh, there's a quiz on. It's tonight. The quiz is tonight.

And I was really hesitant. I was like, I can't be arsed. He's like, come on.

So I was like, fine. So yeah, we went and did it and we fucking won it. I'm so proud of you.

So, so proud of you. Well done. Was it like what sort of quiz was it? Was it general knowledge? It was a themed quiz around Ireland and St. Patrick and St. Patrick's Day and all.

Yeah. So it was just very, very Irish. Very Irish.

Nice. What did we get wrong? We only got three wrong out of the whole quiz. Oh, my God.

I know. You are an absolute Irish machine. I just think Richard and I together are a very good quiz team.

Fair, fair. So that was good. So how does it balance out? Like, are you, are you like, I don't know.

Is he, does he do the sports? Yeah, he's sport and we're both music, but kind of different. Like I'd say I'm more current music than he is. He's more rock kind of like and all that.

Obviously he's sport, he's geography, he's flags. Anything like that. I don't know what I am.

I'm kind of just a generalist. Yeah. And I just randomly know things.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. And also it helped, I suppose, because it was St. Patrick's Day.

Like there had been stuff that I'd just seen in pop culture anyway. Yeah. So I could kind of call that out of my brain.

Yeah. And then anything to do with Friends. Nice.

Which character in Friends was in the film Leprechaun? Jennifer Aniston. Who wrote Pygmalion? George Bernard Shaw. Go on girl, say it.

You can come and quiz with me. I smashed the music round. I will say that though.

Like Richard knew them as well, but I didn't let him get a look in on the quiz sheet writing it down because I was fucking on fire by this point. Because by this point I'd moved on from Guinness to Red. So I was like, I'm doing the music round.

And I smashed it 10 out of 10. Nicely done. Nicely done.

See, I can't do a pub quiz with Will. I just can't. Why? Well, mainly because.

You're both thick? We're both really thick. No, he knows so much more than me about random stuff. So it's like, if it's a themed quiz, like usually I can do all right.

Like there'll be like one or two rounds that it's like, that's me. But he's just, he always knows the answer. He always knows better.

And then is he right? I'd probably say about 7 out of 10. He's right, usually. But it was a bit like I remember years ago, me and my sister persuaded my parents to come with us to the New Cross Inn.

Oh yeah. And we went and did the pub quiz at the New Cross Inn. And I don't know why, because it was a Monday night as well.

Just like plod over to New Cross. Why not? And we were doing it. And the question was, and it goes down in family history and law to this day.

The question was, which animal has just given birth at Edinburgh Zoo? Right. The answer, famously, famously, the answer is panda. Right.

Panda. My dad sits there and he goes, I know this one. What is it then, dad? Panda, right, it's panda.

He's like, no, it's giraffe. What do you mean? I should know. I like giraffes.

It's a giraffe. But that's not really newsworthy. It was a panda.

Yeah, of course. But now whenever anything comes up about any sort of animal or a quiz, it would tend to be, just ask dad. Is it a giraffe? Because dad really likes giraffes.

So yeah, I'm rubbish for the pub quiz. So Richard and I famously love a fucking quiz. So we will often like, also the amount of times that we've come back from a night out and it's been like midnight or whatever.

And we've sat there, open another drink. And we're doing a YouTube. There's a quiz, it's the pub quiz by Jay or Jay's pub quiz.

I can't remember what it's called, but we hate Jay. Like famously. And like we fast forward all of him talking other than the questions.

Shut up Jay! He's so irritating. But we love, he does it. Give the man his dues.

He does a very good quiz. He can write a good quiz. I sounded like you then.

He can write a good quiz. But the amount of times that we've kind of looked the next morning, one, our handwriting, because we've got our separate quiz books as well, by the way. Of course you do.

We swapped a mark and everything. We take it very seriously. Oh my God, that's amazing.

But the handwriting, what even was the question? Because what is as the answer? I don't know, but you scored it right for me. So it must have been okay. But we were really excited.

I think it must have been a Christmas or maybe it was a birthday or something where we were going to my mum's and the family were going to do a quiz and we're like, everyone get together, we're all going to do it. And my gran loves a pub quiz too. There was a question.

I can vaguely remember, but I can't remember the answer and I can't remember what the problem was. But it was having to do with hot air balloons and helium and gas and what is the gas and like, blah, blah, blah. What is it that makes it go and like, what? Combustion.

I don't know. It was something in this arena. And my brother and my stepdad just took complete, like, umbridge at the question, like the question is wrong.

And then that was it. The whole quiz just went into fucking shambles. I just disarray because, well, I'm not answering any more of this pathetic man's questions.

He doesn't know science. Yeah, that's kind of the whole novelty of this is we must hate Jay. Everyone must hate him.

That's the point. Like he says general knowledge because he said it wrong once and now he just names that round general knowledge every time. And like, it's so annoying, but you do it because the quiz, that's the point.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. It was completely lost.

We don't, we don't quiz there anymore. Oh, I remember. Sorry.

Last quiz. Okay. I knew we had so many quiz anecdotes.

No, I, uh, so when I worked at the Fox, they used to do it again. There was a pub quiz every Monday done by legendary Carl to Bob. Um, and I remember I used to go every Monday after work.

This was before I worked there and I'd meet up with some friends and we'd all, we were in a little team together. Yeah. And there was a question I'd been up.

It was my turn to go to the bar and I had been useless at every single question up until this point. I was just like, it's not my day. It's fine.

Right. I'm going to go get drinks. Anyone else want one went and did the round.

So I'm standing at the bar ordering the drinks. And, um, and then he asked a question. It was something to do with Shakespeare.

It was a name, the Shakespeare play or whatever. And I knew the answer, got so excited that I knew the answer that stopped ordering midway through an order, just ran away from the pub. I thought you were going to say, you just shouted it.

No, no, no. Ran away from the barmaid who was standing there going like Ellen bless her. She put up with a lot from me.

Um, uh, ran away straight back to the table. But as I was going, I managed to slip on something, but it was quite impressive because I slipped fell on my ass or skidded to the little raised stage bit where my mates were sitting, doing the quiz and just went the taming of the shrew. Annoyingly, they'd already got it.

And then I just had to do this slightly like awkward wet and dirty and I've actually really badly bruised my coccyx, but I'm not going to let anyone know that and trundle back to the bar. So yeah, get very competitive, even though I'm shit at them. I, um, yeah, I get competitive too.

Although I say I get very competitive in pub quizzes when you're marking other people's and I'm like, which is like, Oh, come on, like, you've got to give that to them. It's like misspelt by one letter. And I'm like, Oh, do I know? That is actually incorrect.

That's actually wrong. Amazing. Amazing.

Oh, well, I'm very, very happy for you. Well done. It was a ray of sunshine and otherwise quite a bleak month.

Well, we are now officially I believe officially in your the month of your birth. I think when this comes out. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Is it when this one comes out? I'm not trying to look at the calendar but your laptop is stuck. There's too many things on my things.

Yeah, there's too many. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. So happy April fools. Happy April fools.

Psych. I don't know. I hate pranks.

I can't think of what it would be. I don't like pranks either. They just seem very unfair.

None of them are funny. Ellis and John did a good like thing about hating pranks when it was just like, Oh, we've kidnapped your mom and fed it to your dad and we've shaved your eyebrows and we've killed your dog. April fools.

Very funny. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I don't really go in for April fools. Although I do find it quite funny because a mutual friend of ours is born on April fools day and it makes a lot of sense. So one of Richard's very best friends is born on April fools and they call it April Sean's day.

Nice. Well, it's well, you can bleep this out. It's his birthday.

Oh, is it? Yeah. Yeah. That suits him.

A hundred percent. Really, really suits him. When else would he have been born? When else? I haven't seen him for ages.

I know he's back now. He's not in Australia anymore. Is he? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bleep his name out, but we might as well bring down his fucking bank details. So unidentifiable. He's got his date of birth, his current location.

I love the current location is not Australia. That's it though. Oh, dear.

Yeah. Well, happy, happy month of birth. Thanks.

Yeah. It's exciting. Well, I would have a good birthday, but someone selfishly has made it so I have to get up at the crack of dawn the next day.

It's also I realised how fucking error am I. I'm going to a gig the night of your birthday. Oh, my God. So what am I going to do? I'm just going to stay up.

Is that what I'm going to have to do? No, because it's you. You'll die. I know.

But yeah, I don't know. Because I'm going to come back and have like two hours, two and a half bits. Two and a half bits.

Two and a bit hours of sleep and then get off and go. We're going to have to get a taxi or something. I don't know how else we're going to get to that airport on that time.

I meant to ask you about that. I was going to say, do you want me to look at parking again? Well, yeah, baby, we'll figure that out. But yes, we have sorted that.

We'll do that. We have sorted the mini retirement. We are not going to a war zone.

No drone strike. Is that a bird? Is it a plane? Although, as I said to you when I spoke to them, so I finally, Travis, if you saw my very diamond shoes post on Instagram the other week, because I was just really fucked off with the whole situation, you would have seen that Love Holidays and Ryanair were being dicks. And we're not being particularly helpful.

I'm so scared about going with Ryanair. I know. Baggage wise.

Oh, well, no, because I paid for us to have extra baggage on the plane. So we can have you can have a minute on the ground on the ground. It can stay there on the plane.

No, I'm in the cabin. Okay, so we don't have a whole bag, but I've got you haven't got a whole bag, but you've got a wheelie suitcase and a backpack. Okay, yeah, I can make this work.

So I'm so scared. Oh, you'll be fine. Rachel to go to Lanzarote for what? What was it? Five nights? Yeah, which is what we're doing.

Yeah, yeah. I took a huge like that was I think I had a 22 kg limit and I got it was 21. Oh my god.

Right. So fucking huge case. I had a wheelie cabin bag.

Oh my god. And a backpack and a handbag. Oh my god.

Yeah, you'll have to make it work. I'm afraid because I'm not I'm not I can't. I'm not doing anything.

I'm not dealing with them anymore. I'm not. I finally got it sorted.

I've had so many back and forth with Ashwin from Love Holidays. Don't name us. Poor Ashwin.

Maybe I'll try and FedEx some stuff to the hotel. Yeah, I think that's a really sensible plan. What is it? It's just my heaviest shoes.

See, I love the fact that like, I've got you on the one extreme with the packing. And then I've got another friend who's on the complete opposite extreme. All right.

Right. So this other friend, she went to Disneyland in Florida. Yeah.

For three weeks. Right. And managed to pack all of the stuff that she needed in one cabin thing for three weeks.

And, and off she went. I think it was because she was just planning on like, Oh, I'll just get t shirts and whatever while I'm out there. Because I'm gonna buy loads of stuff.

I don't know. But she did that. So when I said to her, like, we're gonna go to we're going to Poland.

She said we're going to Poland. And then we was like, well, what's the situation with the bags? She's literally, like smallest carry on bag ever. And I was like, we're going to two nights.

It's fine. She's like, yeah, I mean, you'll manage for two nights if I manage for three weeks. So yeah, but we are we are, we have sorted it.

And we're no longer going to war zone. And so that will be your birthday treat. Yes.

And a nice little mini retirement for five days. Very excited. It'll be lovely.

So we need to also then record for that at some point. Pump these cases out, bitch. We really do.

Speaking of which, do you want to tell me a story? I thought you were going to like, I don't know, give me another job then. I was like, what now? What do you want? No, I wouldn't do that to you. I promise.

I promise. I just really want to hear a story. Okay, cool.

I'll tell you one then. Perfect. I'm going to get myself comfy.

I'm going to try not to be as special as last week with my getting of my drink. There we go. I mean, you still went about it a bit weird, but less weird.

Also, we'll maybe cut this out. Your tits look massive. I'm just finally wearing a bra with under wiring again.

So you've just taken that that one crop top off basically. Yes, pretty much. Pretty much.

No, I told you. I'm doing my whole like... Fucking huge. They definitely are bigger since having the children.

Well, yeah, obviously. There we go. You don't need to cut that out.

It's fine. I never get compliments on my bosom. Anyway, story.

I've written this one slightly differently. Okey dokey. So if it doesn't work, just everyone tell me that you hate it and I'll go back.

Maybe don't tell her that you hate it. Just maybe say, I won't fucking listen, but you can tell me. OK, fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.

Paradise Road, Stockwell, SW4. It's a Tuesday afternoon at just after three o'clock on the 4th of March, 2025. It's the kind of street you'd barely clock if you drove down it.

Residential, quiet. There's a primary school nearby, so there are parents milling about and kids starting to filter home. People are coming back from shift work and it's just normal life.

It's an ordinary Tuesday. Nathaniel Burrell is outside. He's 16 years old and he knows the street.

He lives here. But somewhere nearby, two men are waiting for him. Now, today's case is a very recent one.

It's quite raw, in fact, as this one happened just over a year ago and the verdict only came in a few weeks before I sat down to research it. Yeah, I was going to say. It's a case that made national headlines and then, as they so often do, kind of faded from them.

But it shouldn't be forgotten. So this is the story of Nathaniel Burrell. So Nathaniel was a 16-year-old boy, a Manchester United fan and a kid who loved his PlayStation.

He was a boy with a wonderful smile who lived on the same street where he was shot dead in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. Oh, Christ. Now, before we go any further, a very obvious content note here.

This episode contains descriptions of a fatal shooting, discussions of gang violence or van guilence. Or van guilence, yeah. And county lines exploitation.

It also references drill music being used to celebrate killings. And yeah, it's dark. So please just take care of yourself.

Anyway, let's start where we always start. Nathaniel Burrell was 16 years old. He lived in Stockwell, not just near it, not on the edges of it, but right in the heart of it, on the Studley Estate.

This was his neighbourhood, his home. The street where he was killed was, in every sense, his doorstep. He had a younger sister and he was bright at school.

He was described by people who knew him as a very bright pupil. He was, by all accounts, from the people who loved him, a genuinely good kid. The kind of teenager you'd want your own kid to be friends with.

His dad worked nearby at a go-karting facility and was a family man. They were a rooted local family living an ordinary South London life. Nathaniel was very passionate about football.

And outside of that, he did what millions of other teenagers do. He played PlayStation 5 quite religiously. Now, I'm going to pause here for a sec.

As will become apparent, there are gaps in this story. Okay. And a lot of that, I'm not going to... It will become apparent why, as we go through.

There's still shit to go down. Fine. Right? So, if it feels a bit, okay.

You know, all we really know is his age, his address, and that he likes the PlayStation. Like, all right, give me more. But, you know, we're working with what we've got.

Fair enough, mate. So, Nathaniel's aunt, Angie Downs, spoke to journalists the day after he died. She'd been at the scene on Paradise Road, where flowers were already beginning to pile up at the railings.

She hadn't slept. She told reporters it didn't feel real. She talked about his smile.

Quote, he had such a wonderful smile, she said. He was such a good boy. He was well-loved, and he's going to be well-missed.

And then she said something that has kind of stayed with me since I first read it. Something that I think is at the heart of this case. Quote, this can't happen to anyone else.

Now, I'm going to deal with the shooting itself in a sec. So, the 4th of March, 2025. It's 21 minutes past three in the afternoon.

Nathaniel is outside a residential block on Paradise Road. The primary school nearby will be coming out around now. What Nathaniel doesn't know, what he can't know, is that he's being watched.

In the hours leading up to this moment, two men have been circling Paradise Road in a white Nissan Juke. Not lost, not passing through, circling. CCTV footage recovered by the police would later show just how deliberate this was.

They had scoped the area, and they knew where Nathaniel was at all times. One of the men was 32-year-old Omar Prempeh, who was from Forest Hill in south-east London. He was driving.

The other was 17-year-old Neo Dodudu Watson from Peckham, just a few miles away. Same South London postcodes, same world. Neo was the one with the gun.

Oh, fuck, he was 17! Neo was wearing a Just Eat delivery jacket, the kind of workwear that makes you invisible in a city where delivery riders are everywhere, and nobody looks twice. He was on... He'd exited the Juke and got onto a stolen moped. This wasn't just a clever idea he'd had on the morning.

Using food delivery uniforms as cover for criminal activity, moving drugs, carrying weapons, conducting surveillance, has become a documented pattern in London. The high-vis jacket means that the rider kind of blends into the city's background. And in the wrong hands, it's the perfect disguise.

Investigators know this, and someone involved in this operation knew it too. At 3.21pm, Neo rode the moped along Paradise Road and opened fire. Nathaniel Burrell was shot twice, once in the chest and once in the back.

The gun was a converted pistol, a legally decommissioned weapon that had been illegally modified to fire live ammunition. These converted firearms are a specific and growing problem in the UK, urban gun crime. They circulate through criminal networks, often brought in through Europe, and they're notoriously unpredictable, which is exactly what happened here.

Spoiler alert. The prosecution barrister at the Old Bailey, Alan Gardner, KC, told the court that Neo intended to fire more shots, but the gun malfunctioned. It actually kind of disintegrated, and parts of the gun were left at the scene.

Oh, wow. But two shots were all it took. One of the bullets caused what the prosecution described as catastrophic internal bleeding.

Despite that, despite everything his body had just absorbed, Nathaniel ran. He made it a short distance before he collapsed against a fence. Oh, bless him.

Members of the public were with him within moments, and they didn't leave him. Emergency services arrived, including paramedics and London's air ambulance, but they couldn't save him. Nathaniel Burrell was pronounced dead at the scene.

16 years old, on the street he grew up on. He was the first person to be fatally shot in London in 2025. While Nathaniel lay dying on Paradise Road, Neo fled on the moped.

He rode to where Omar was waiting. Not at the scene, Omar had stayed back in the Duke ready. CCTV had captured Neo threading through traffic at speed, and then getting into the car, and then the car disappearing.

This was not two lads acting on impulse. This was a very well-organized operation. And the car itself tells you that as well.

Inside the dashboard of that white Nissan Duke, police later found a concealed compartment, which was custom built, deliberately constructed to hide a firearm. The gun went in there before the approach. It was then used.

What was left of it, given that it had disintegrated, was brought back. You don't build a hidden gun compartment in your car on a whim. No, probably not.

And there was a base. Police identified a flat on Union Road in Stockwell, which was just a short distance from the shooting, as a key hub for this operation. It was, in the language investigators use, a trap house.

A premises used for drug dealing, planning, movement. Omar and Neo were regular visitors. It was effectively where they worked.

When police searched Union Road, they found drugs, they found live ammunition in one of the bedrooms, and they found the packaging for the Just Eat jacket. Right. The disguise had come from that flat, and the trail led straight back to that front door.

So obviously the police had launched a murder investigation under Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lee. And what her team built over the weeks that followed is genuinely impressive. So let me walk you through some of the pieces.

So there was the CCTV. There was hours of footage from cameras all across Stockwell, which captured the Duke circling before the shooting, from the moped arriving, the gunshots, the getaway, frame by frame. They built a complete visual record of the day.

Then there was phone data. So call records, location pings, messages. The communications between Omar and Neo in the lead up to the killing were all unpicked.

The movements corroborated what the cameras showed. And then there was social media. And this is where it gets both kind of forensically useful and genuinely disturbing.

In the aftermath of the shooting, after a teenager lay dead on a South London street, Neo Doo Doo Watson wrote drill lyrics, bragging about it, celebrating in the language of the drill scene about winning the beef, taunting rival gang members in Stockwell. That content was recovered and used as evidence. A 17-year-old boy writing victory songs about a murder he committed.

And then there was the gaming data. Now this is where it gets quite clever, I think. Before leaving to meet Omar on the day of the killing, Neo didn't just... Neo did something else, which I'll tell you about in a minute.

Fine. But he also left his phone at home and set up an active gaming session on his PlayStation so that effectively all the data would show him as being at home playing games at the exact time that Nathaniel was being shot. Oh, that is quite clever.

He was trying to create a fake alibi across multiple digital systems simultaneously. The gaming data the investigators recovered wasn't just passive location evidence. It was a deliberate plant.

But it did unravel, obviously. So there was the vehicle movements, there was the ANPR cameras, dashcams from passing cars and the CCTV again. The Duke's journey was tracked meticulously across the city.

DCI Lee described the work her team did like this, quote, they had built a minute-by-minute account of the suspect's actions. Not a sketch, not a vague implication, a minute-by-minute account. Good.

But I need to go back to something that I almost spoiled for you all there. Because there is kind of a different, I don't want to say much bigger, but a different story here as well. So at the time of the shooting, Neo was subject to electronic monitoring.

Oh. He had been wearing an ankle tag, the kind of device that is supposed to tell the authorities exactly where a person is at all times because they have been assessed as someone who needs to be kept track of. Yeah.

Neo had managed to remove it and then put it back on afterwards. Oh my God. And the system, at least in the immediate aftermath, didn't catch it.

Didn't recognise it. Oh Christ. This is not just a story about one resourceful teenager though.

It's a story about a system that was already failing before this murder happened. So the UK's electronic tagging programme has been dogged by problems for years. A National Audit Office report found that the transformation programme cost almost £100 million and the government has had to rely on old, outdated technology with fundamental inefficiencies remaining unresolved.

The contract of running the service changed from Capita to Serco in 2024, the year before this murder. And the monitoring of young people on tags, particularly those assessed as high risk, has repeatedly been flagged as inadequate by inspectors and oversight bodies. And yet we've just... Oh, we'll just keep it then.

Right. A 17-year-old on a tag, a murder committed, the tag replaced and it took a full murder investigation, not the monitoring system, to piece together what had happened. That is a systemic failure and it deserves to be named as one.

100%. So, but... Regardless of all of this, Neo was arrested on Sunday the 9th of March, five days after the killing and charged with murder three days later. Omar was arrested two days before that, on the 7th of March in Croydon and charged the following day.

A 40-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender and possession of drugs with intent to supply. Her case has not been publicly resolved at the time of recording and another thread in this story that remains open. Right.

So, I want to spend some time on the two men convicted... Spoiler alert. Yeah. I have written this badly, is what I'm learning.

On the two men charged with the killing of Nathaniel. And I want to be honest with you, the public record on who they are, where they come from and what their lives looked like before all of this is remarkably thin. Fine.

So, what we know in terms of hard facts is this. Omar Prempeh, not 100% sure I'm saying that right, was born on the 22nd of December 1992, making him 32 at the time of the murder. He lived on Sunderland Road in Forest Hill, South London.

And he was the logistics man. The driver, the planner, the one who modified the car with its concealed compartment, the one who waited while a teenager was shot dead by another teenager and then drove that teenage gunman away. He didn't pull the trigger.

He doesn't need to have done. Neo Dodoodoo Watson was born on the 30th of October 2007, making him 17 at the time of the murder. He lived on Samuel Street in Southwark, deep in the same South London postcodes as the victim.

He rode the moped, he fired the gun, he removed his tag, staged the gaming session and then put the tag back on. And then he wrote lyrics celebrating what he'd done. Beyond that, they're schooling, they're upbringing their families, their histories before their criminal records and networks.

There's nothing on public record yet. And I think, you know, that's kind of its own statement. There's going to be a lot more that comes out about this because there is also a retrial pending.

I see. With three additional defendants waiting to be tried. Oh, wow.

OK, it's likely that some of this information is being kept back deliberately, obviously, reporting restrictions, legal strategy, the protection of ongoing proceedings. And when that retrial concludes and sentencing is delivered, we will almost certainly know more and I'll come back to you all. Fair enough.

But they were found guilty and the two of them. And what DCI Sarah Lee said after the verdict was that, quote, this case had a deeply troubling element of child exploitation at its core. Now, that's not an excuse for Neo.

He was convicted of murder, and rightly so. But a recognition that a 17 year old boy doesn't arrive at a stolen moped with a converted pistol and a Just Eat jacket on, on his own. Yeah, exactly.

Someone put him there. Someone recruited him in the language of the court. Someone decided that a teenager was the right person to carry out this killing.

Omar was 32 and he had a 17 year old do this killing for him is kind of what it seems like to me. And that's, you know, that's how these networks function. So these three additional defendants.

So all I know is that one of them is a man named Jeffrey Frimpol. OK. And there are two teenagers who cannot be named for legal reasons.

Wow. They faced trial alongside Omar and Neo, but the jury couldn't reach verdicts on them. Right.

OK. So a retrial is expected later in 2026. And sentencing for Omar and Neo has been deferred until after that retrial.

Right. OK, fine. So we don't have a full picture yet.

Not even close. And there is a question that kind of sits at the center of this case that I have to be honest with you about. We don't fully know why Nathaniel was targeted.

OK. What the prosecution did tell the jury at the Old Bailey was this. The motive's origins lay in the trade of illegal drugs.

OK. Alan Gardner, KC, said the killing had, quote, many of the hallmarks of serious organized crime. Court reporting also described Neo as having been recruited by a drugs gang to carry out the shooting, framing this not as a spontaneous confrontation, but as a directed contracted hit within a criminal network.

Some said it could potentially have been an initiation. Right. As well.

Yeah. And then there was kind of some other context around this as well. So Neo was from Peckham and Nathaniel lived in Stockwell.

The Peckham to Stockwell geography has a long and well-documented history of territorial gang conflict in South London. The drill lyrics that Neo wrote afterwards taunting rival gang members in Stockwell and talking about winning the beef strongly suggest this killing was framed within that world as a victory in an ongoing dispute. But here's again what we don't know.

Specifically, what was this dispute? Was Nathaniel involved in it? Was he perceived rightly or wrongly as a rival? Was he targeted for something he did? Something he knew? Or simply because of where he lived? Was he in the most devastating possibility of it at all? Really to me is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could it have been any young person on that road that day? So we don't have any answers to those questions yet. But what I will say is with three defendants still to face retrial and with sentencing deferred until that process is complete.

The full story of why Nathaniel Burrell died is still legally and publicly unfinished. When the retrial concludes, which is a bit of a... Some places said it was going to take place in the summer. Some said it wasn't until kind of October maybe.

But it's expected to be later this year. We will obviously then know significantly more about the motive, about the network, about who knew what and when. And I will be watching very closely.

So the, like I said, the trial took place at the Old Bailey and the prosecution was led by Alan Gardner-Casey and the Crown Prosecution Service was represented by District Crown Prosecutor Shanie Taggart. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to stop you there. There is a Taggart within the CPS.

Does she say... Murder. Murder. Because if she doesn't, that's a real shame.

I'm just going to put that out there. Well, sorry, derailed us entirely. No, hang on, I'm just reading.

I've got a quote from her here. I'm just reading to see if I can do it in a voice. No.

But Shanie Taggart did say something after the verdict, which I think is worth kind of sitting with. Yeah, fair. She said that it was, quote, a premeditated and calculated attack where both defendants went to extraordinary measures in their attempts to evade detection.

And then she goes on to say, quote, firearms have no place in our communities. Seeing them in the hands of young people is deeply concerning. And in this case, the consequences were devastating and irreversible.

So I kind of want to go back to Paradise Road one more time. Yep. Not necessarily to the afternoon of the shooting, but to the days after, because the community's response was pretty epic.

People came to lay flowers and lots of them. Bouquets tied to the railings, cards, photographs, the kind of impromptu memorial that has heartbreakingly become a feature of this city's landscape. Florence Eshalomi, the MP for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green, whose constituency takes in Stockwell, shared her condolences publicly and she called it a life wasted.

Residents of Paradise Road spoke to journalists. One woman said the area, quote, hasn't been like this since the 80s. Another described walking home at night, knowing where the cameras are.

Someone else mentioned that her own son had been stabbed a few years earlier. These are not isolated tragedies. They exist in a landscape of grief.

A city that keeps losing its young people and keeps having the same conversations about why and keeps failing to fully answer them. Nathaniel's aunt stood at the edge of the crime scene, having not slept and said, this can't happen to anyone else. She wasn't just grieving for her family member.

She was grieving for the community, for the next family, for whoever comes after. I said at the start that this podcast, obviously, you know, we always try and remember the people at the centre of these stories. But part of doing that and part of truly honouring a life lost is asking the questions that the headlines don't always ask.

So why is a 17-year-old boy riding a stolen moped with a converted pistol? Why is he being recruited and directed by a man in a car with a hidden weapons compartment? Why is he operating out of a drug distribution flat in Stockwell with live ammunition in the bedroom? And why, when he was already on a lot of electronic tag, already being monitored, already flagged as someone who needed to be kept track of and supported, was the system around him not catching what was happening? Yeah, all very good questions. The answers aren't comfortable. They involve a decade plus of county lines exploitation of young people, mostly boys, mostly from disadvantaged South London postcodes, being recruited, groomed and used by criminal networks that are far more sophisticated than a lot of people realise.

They involve a drool music culture that, at its darkest edges, documents and glorifies real violence. They involve austerity, cuts to youth services, inadequate mental health provision and schools and communities trying to do more with less. And they involve a tagging system that cost nearly £100 million to overhaul and still failed to catch a 17-year-old removing his monitor, committing a murder and replacing it afterwards.

DCI Lee said it plainly, quote, protecting the children in our communities is everyone's responsibility. Everyone's, not just the police, not just the courts, everyone. There are three more defendants, including two more teenagers who still face retrial for their alleged roles in Nathaniel's murder.

Two more young people. How many more are in that network? How many boys are being handed a jacket and a moped and a gun and pointed at someone? How many Paradise Roads are there? Nathaniel Burrell was shot and killed on Paradise Road in Stockwell on the 4th of March, 2025. He was 16 years old.

He loved Manchester United. He played PlayStation 5. He had a wonderful smile and a dad who worked down the road and a little sister and a whole life ahead of him. After the verdict, his family said this, quote, Nathaniel touched so many hearts, the pain of his absence is felt every day.

If you're worried about a young person who may be at risk of gang exploitation, you can call the police on 101 or contact Crime Stoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. If you want to support organisations working directly with young people in South London, look up Dwayne Namick's Boxing Club in Brixton or Gangsline, which works specifically with gang affected young people across the capital. Well done.

Thanks, babe. That's, it's always really difficult to do like a more recent case. It's incredibly fresh and there was part of me that wasn't going to do it.

Or that was going to leave this as it was, written as it is and just come back to it. Yeah, fair. But I thought, I just didn't, I don't know why.

I just didn't want to. Yeah, fair. And I don't, you know, obviously we don't know the full story and it might be a very long time before we do.

Yeah. And I just think these, the news is so circular, right? And these cases seem to come up so quickly. Yeah.

That by the time this retrial happens and then sentencing happens and we get a full public record of everything, including what, if any, Nathaniel's involvement in this world is, people won't remember his name. No, exactly. No, you're right.

You're right, 100% you are. And especially in South London, I remember 2025 was fucking intense for shit like this. And I remember this happening.

I remember the reading the reporting about it and it was everywhere. Oh, yeah. For like a month, maybe.

And then it just disappeared. And I do wonder as well, whether it's, I don't know if it's just kind of like doing this podcast and sort of knowing the sort of victims that we cover quite often, is the news cycle like, oh, it's another young black boy. Oh, it's another gang related crime.

Oh, it's, you know, it doesn't need the same level of, it almost feels a little bit like the mainstream news kind of see it as it doesn't necessarily need the same amount of care and sympathy as other cases that we have covered, which is disgustingly sad. Like, not in all of the reporting, but you can even see it in the type of language used in some of the reporting. It's so kind of mechanical.

Yeah. That it's this happened and then this happened and then this happened. Yeah.

And like, if, you know, I'm just going to say if it was a 16 year old white girl. Yeah. It would have been the emotive language used and the outpouring of grief.

Like it would have just, it would have been overwhelming. Right. It was just like, well, he's just collateral damage.

Right. It's what it felt like in some of the reporting. And it's, I know, obviously we don't know the.

And I'm careful about that. Like, I don't know. Nathaniel might not have been a saint.

No, I have no idea. No, exactly. We're going off of what we've got about him.

And like, bear in mind, there is a lot out there that says a lot of conjecture. Yeah, fair. So I haven't included any of it.

No, fair enough. Until it's reported officially. Yeah, it doesn't count.

We've, I think the thing is, though, it's one of those things where we've, again, we've said this before in episodes, like he doesn't have to have been a saint. No, he still doesn't need to have been fucking shot twice. He's a 16 year old lad.

Like who had his entire life ahead of him, regardless of whether he was, you know, an altar boy or, you know, something the opposite. He still could have had a life that he could have turned around if he was involved in stuff. People do it all the time.

He could have gone on to be someone who achieved amazing, amazing things. And we will never know. Because some idiots.

Or he could have just lived a completely ordinary life. Exactly. Completely normal life.

And that would have been. That would have been fine for him. Exactly.

You know, it would have been. Not everyone, you know, you don't. I don't know.

You don't have to be miraculous to be worthy. Exactly. And he had every right to.

She tells herself regularly. While rubbing her shoulders. You don't have to be miraculous to be worthy.

You don't have to be miraculous to be worthy. But no, but I think you're right. Like it's, it's.

I just can't get over his age. It's just that's the bit that's so scary. It's kids killing kids.

There is kids killing kids. I do. I was thinking about while you were telling the story.

And I know, again, this is conjecture on our part because we don't know the answers, but the idea of it being completely random and of him being like, it literally could have been anyone. I don't know that I believe that. Trust that.

Yeah. I think that in my view, and that's mainly because of the fact that when you said about the car circling the estate. They were watching him.

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like, unless it was they, for some reason, caught sight of him, that's the target we're locking on to.

I mean, that could also be what happened, but I feel like there is, there's some connection there. What that connection is, we'll never know. We might do kind of early 2027.

Yeah. But we definitely don't know it at the moment. But yeah, but it's also like the fact that you've got a 32 year old man with this 17 year old.

And one of the things I remember reading on, I can't remember what case it was we were covering. But I was reading, doing some research for it. And it was kind of saying that like, a lot of the kids who find themselves in sort of county lines and stuff like that, regardless of race.

Yeah. But generally the boys who find themselves caught up in it, usually come from homes. And again, I say all of this, I'm not telling everyone with the same brush.

This is a generalization that I'm making here. But usually come from families where there isn't a father figure. Right.

Okay. And so part of the reason why they are so easily groomed is because they have these older men who are looking out for them. It seems at first that they're protecting them and like, you know, giving them the sort of the attention that they might not have had at home because they don't have a father figure in their lives for whatever reason.

And I think that there's something so it just, it makes my blood boil to think that there are people who are able to manipulate young people who, you know, they do just need a bit of, I don't know, in a lot of ways, I think some of them just need a hug. Like they don't, they don't, you prey upon these kids. And that's the bit that really bothers me.

It's the fact that you are purposely seeking out people who are vulnerable. Yeah. Maybe not in the sort of most obvious sense, but they are, they're vulnerable and they are easily led and they are easily swayed.

And you, the older people who are doing that, they are fully, fully just like, yeah, they are, they are preying on them. And it's just, it's horrible. Absolutely horrible.

You should be, a grown-up should be a safe space for a kid, not a, yeah. But that's probably far too much of a simplistic view on it. No, I hear you.

I hear you. It's really sad. Well, look, listen, thank you so much.

You're very welcome. For everything that you were able to find. It feels like a bit of a blue ball one, really.

Oh, it's all right. It's not, I think that you're right. Like we want to get, with a lot of these cases, we're trying to make sure that people do remember the people and the fact that they were real people.

This isn't just us telling a story. This is us telling someone's story. And you're right.

Why leave it until his name? We need to remind everyone of who he is. Well, yeah, because I stand by what I said. I think by the time all the reporting comes out after the retrial and after sentencing.

Yeah. I think people are going to be like, who? Yeah, exactly. Who was that again? Yeah, exactly.

And it's, yeah, we can try and catch some of them. Yeah, exactly. Who was it, Daniel? And he liked Man U and he played PS5.

Yeah, he was a big brother. He was a big brother. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, bless him. Oh, well, shall we do some of the nice bits? Why not? Just to round us off. All right, then.

Nice bits. We have a website that is SinisterSouthPod at, no, SinisterSouthPod.co.uk. We have an email address that is SinisterSouthPodcast at gmail.com. We've got our social media. We are on Instagram and TikTok.

And both of those are at Sinister South. Or if you want to come and see what Hannah and I are up to on our sort of personal ones, then you can do that at rach.andhan.sinistersouth over on Instagram. We've got the lovely Loos, Trevor's Unite Facebook group.

Go over there, have a chat. Talk about anything you like, really. You're giving people permission.

I'm giving you permission. You don't have to just talk about how amazing we are. You can talk about other things.

Yeah, and then we've got the Patreon. Yes. Which is Sinister South as well.

So you can go over there and eventually get some content. Yeah, I think that's about it for this one. Yeah.

So Trevor's, you are amazing and lovely as always. And we love you very, very much. And we hope that, yeah, you're enjoying the podcast.

One of the things I wanted to say, because we haven't done it in a while. I could tell she was, I could see the cogs turning. There was steam coming off of her.

I was like, she's gearing up for something here. I was gonna say, one of the things we haven't asked for in a little while is, that like, we, ratings really do, yeah. Ratings and reviews really do help grow a podcast.

And we have absolutely, we've got an absolutely banging group of you that listen. But we'd love to, we know that there are more Trevor's out there and we'd love to find them. So if you could give us a lovely five star review and just tell someone about us, that would be lovely.

And we would love you even more than we already do. So there we go. That's true.

Cool. All right, now I will actually say bye-bye. Okay.

Have a good week, Trevor's. Look after yourself. Take care.

Bye-bye.