Rhys Milford Jones had a season ticket at Goodison Park, kept alongside his father's and his older brother's. He was eleven years old. He played football. On the evening of 22 August 2007, he was walking home from training across the car park of the Fir Tree pub in Croxteth, in north Liverpool, when a teenage gunman on a silver mountain bike fired three shots into a dispute he had no part in. One of those shots killed him. He never reached the rival gang the gunman was aiming at, because the gunman never came close to hitting them. Rhys did. He died on the tarmac, two miles from home, in his football kit.
Rhys was the second-born son of Stephen and Melanie Jones, and the younger brother of Owen, born in 1990. The family lived in the Norris Green area of Liverpool. The Jones household was a football household: Everton, Goodison, the season-ticket ritual that ties families together across Merseyside. When Melanie heard the shots and the news that her son had been hurt, she ran. She was at the scene within minutes. The image of a mother running toward her dying child stayed with the city. In the weeks afterward, on Crimewatch, she did something most parents would find impossible: she made a public appeal directly to the gunman's mother, asking her to turn her son in. Twelve people called the show with the same name.
Detectives initially arrested and released four people aged between 15 and 19. The killer's name was reportedly known on the streets - written in graffiti, circulated on the early Liverpool internet - but witnesses were terrified to speak. The breakthrough came eight months later, in April 2008, when Merseyside police arrested seventeen people across two days. After a nine-week trial at Liverpool Crown Court, on 16 December 2008, Sean Mercer - by then 18, a member of a Croxteth-based gang - was found guilty of Rhys's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years. The shooting had been an attempt to hit rival gang members from another Liverpool neighbourhood; Mercer's gun had been aimed across the car park; he had missed his targets entirely and struck a child walking home with his football kit on. Six other gang members were convicted of assisting an offender. Parents were later convicted of perverting the course of justice. James Yates had his sentence increased to twelve years on appeal in 2009, after the Solicitor General Vera Baird referred the original term as too lenient.
Liverpool grieved together. Everton players laid floral tributes, football boots, and shirts at the scene. At Goodison Park on 25 August, three days after the shooting, the home crowd applauded for a full minute before kickoff against Blackburn Rovers. Three days after that, Liverpool FC - Everton's local rivals across Stanley Park - did something almost unprecedented: ahead of their UEFA Champions League match against Toulouse, the public address system played the opening bars of Z-Cars, the theme that traditionally welcomes the Everton players onto the Goodison pitch, before switching to Liverpool's own anthem 'You'll Never Walk Alone.' The Liverpool players, the Toulouse players, and the match officials all wore black armbands. In a city defined by its football rivalry, the two clubs stood together for a boy who had loved one of them.
Rhys was buried in a private ceremony on 6 September 2007. The funeral service at Liverpool Cathedral drew more than 2,500 people. His family invited the public to come and asked them to wear bright clothes or football strips - not black. Steve Jones read a poem he had written for his son. The Everton footballer Alan Stubbs read from the Bible. In the years afterward, the Rhys Jones Memorial Fund raised money to build a community centre on Langley Close in Croxteth Park, near where Rhys died; the Rhys Jones Community Centre opened on 31 August 2013. A four-part ITV drama, Little Boy Blue, broadcast in 2017, brought the family's story to a national audience. The Joneses have spent the years since campaigning, building, and remembering.
Croxteth lies at approximately 53.450 degrees north, 2.880 degrees west, in northeast Liverpool, immediately adjacent to the Croxteth Hall estate and its country park. Liverpool John Lennon Airport (EGGP) is approximately 7 nautical miles south-southwest. From the air the area shows up as suburban housing nestled against the eastern edge of the M57 motorway, with the wooded estate of Croxteth Park forming a visible green block to the east. The Rhys Jones Community Centre on Langley Close is part of the Croxteth Park residential area. This is a neighbourhood that has carried its own grief with grace; treat any reference to it accordingly.
Croxteth sits at approximately 53.450N, 2.880W in northeast Liverpool, adjacent to Croxteth Park. Nearest airport: Liverpool John Lennon (EGGP), approximately 7nm south-southwest. The M57 motorway runs immediately west of the area. The Rhys Jones Community Centre is on Langley Close in Croxteth Park.