I recently found this circulating on Facebook:

at 8:51pm on January 29
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This message is in memory of my good friend Fuad Buraleh who was brutally beaten to death late friday evening in dean gardens, west ealing... You will be sadly missed and our hearts go out to your family at this moment in time. a friend once wrote "people really need to consider bout taking other peoples lifes, it effects everbody" if you agree with this pass this on. its bout time this mess comes to a stop, dont you think???????
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Fuad Buraleh is the Somali teenager who was murdered in West Ealing Park in January, as mentioned in the last blog.
The strong message being passed on by Fuad's friend reminded me of this:
http://www.bnvillage.co.uk/community-announcements/88470-justice-4-anton-hyman-must-read.html



"March calls for justice for Anton. Anton Hyman was found shot and stabbed in 2004. The family and friends of the 17-year-old who was murdered three years ago have held a march calling for justice. Anton Hyman was shot, stabbed and beaten before being thrown in the River Brent in Greenford, west London. His body was found on 21 March 2004. The memorial march, Justice for Anton, started at midday on Saturday in Brent. The march called for an end to violent crime in the community, including murder and domestic violence, gun and knife crime. The march began at Ealing Hospital opposite Brent Valley Park and moved along the Uxbridge Road to Acton Park where family and community members addressed the crowd"

Anton's mutilated body was found in March 2004, just twenty minutes from where Fuad Buraleh was left for dead this January. http://www.actonw3.com/default.asp?section=info&page=conmurder006.htm

Anton's murder was highly publicised. As well the posters put up around his old primary school, Derwentwater (Woodhurst Road, W3) where I was a pupil two years below him, his parents, Delroy and Vanessa, joined 'Mothers Against Murder and Aggression' or 'MAMAA', a charity set up to support the families of murder victims -http://www.mamaa.org/infalah.html and on what would have been Anton's 19th and 21st birthdays, marches were held from Ealing Hospital to Acton Park. They also put pressure on the Metropolitan Police to repeat the 1996 weapons and ammunitions amnesty. Both were successful ventures, and Anton's parents as well as MAMAA should be accredited for, despite their personal loss, fronting the Ealing campaign against gun and knife crime.

However the underlying tragedy for Anton's family is, that four years on from his death, nobody has been brought to justice for the murder. The scary question has to be asked - is this turning into another Stephen Lawrence case? And no, I'm not referring to another murdered black teenager, I'm referring to the disturbingly strong wall of silence that so often surrounds any youth or gang-related crime.

The stark, harrowing similarities between the images of Fuad and Anton, murdered just three years apart, make me think its about time we started to do something about that wall.