Jaden Moodie: The little boy with dreams who ended up playing gangster

It took just 14 seconds for a gang of drug dealers to drive their stolen Mercedes at Jaden Moodie; knock him off his moped; jump out the car; stab him nine times; jump back in the car; and then speed off.

Just 14 seconds to murder a 14-year-old boy. Jaden didn’t stand a chance. The gang stood over him, stabbing him in a frenzy, the horrifying violence captured on CCTV in a quiet residential street in Leyton in east London.

Even before the evening of the murder on January 8, Jaden’s life was in many senses already slipping away. He had become embroiled in a local gang - the Beaumont Crew - driving around east London on a moped selling drugs to willing users.

A young lad, who had once dreamed of being a champion boxer or else a fashion designer, had been excluded from school only a few weeks before his murder posting gangland poses of himself on social media.

His father is a convicted crack cocaine and heroin dealer, jailed in 2009 after being caught in an undercover police sting.

Julian Moodie, 51, had told Basildon Crown Court in Essex that he had begun dealing drugs to feed his six children. The judge in sentencing him to three-and-a-half years told him: “You were not dealing to fund your habit, you were dealing to earn a living. Dealing in drugs is a totally unacceptable way to do so. Other families manage to live on benefits.”

Mr Moodie has been left devastated. He can see the horror first hand. “Sometimes my son appears in front of me and stares into my eyes,” he said, still grieving almost a year on. “He [Jaden] died brutally at such a young age. It was supposed to be him burying me, not the other way round.”

Jaden’s killer - the only member of the rival Mali Boys gang to be convicted of his murder - also had a troubling family life. Ayoub Majdouline was aged 18 when he killed Jaden, leaving the boy, four years his junior, to bleed to death in the street. The other members of the gang have got away with it for now but Majdouline, who accepted being a drug dealer but denied being present at the attack, faces many years in jail when he is sentenced next week.

Majdouline’s life has also been wrecked by drugs. There will be far less sympathy for such a vicious, cold-blooded killer but in many ways like his victim he also never stood a chance. In 2015, Majdouline’s father was also murdered. Othamane Majdouline, 48, was beaten with a hammer and stabbed at his flat in King’s Cross, along with another man. Their killer, Paul O’Shea, then 37, had argued with the men after visiting Mr Majdouline to buy Class A drugs. After the attack, O’Shea, jailed for life, set fire to the flat to destroy evidence.

Majdouline, struggling with a troubled up bringing, had turned dealing drugs in county lines gang - so-called because they run drugs from the cities and out to the counties -  “to survive”, the Old bailey heard during his trial.

Majdouline had been caught with drugs and carrying knives, but despite serving time in jail, had always gone straight back to dealing.

By 2018, the National Crime Agency (NCA), Britain’s FBI, had identified him as a victim of “modern slavery”, subjected to exploitation by older youths.

The court heard that at the time that Majdouline had come under the NCA radar, Jaden was also getting himself into trouble. In March last year, aged just 13, he was handed a youth conditional caution after police seized an air-powered pistol, Rambo knife and cannabis during an altercation in Nottingham, where he was living at the time. Then in October, Jaden was found with crack cocaine at an address in Bournemouth. A month after that, the schoolboy pleaded guilty to possession of an imitation firearm after appearing in a Snapchat video holding the weapon. The caption read: “looool don’t f--- wid us please were here again.”

Jaden had grown up in Nottingham. He was pictured at Nottingham School of Boxing with a smile across his face, dressed in a t-shirt and sat next to his great idol, the heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua. In the photograph he looks angelic.

But in Nottingham the problems were mounting. The Old Bailey was told of a series of incidents before the killing, including one in which Jaden’s mother was threatened and forced to hand over cash on her doorstep in Nottingham by another gang.

Jada Bailey had been forced to call police. An older boy - aged 16 - had arrived on the family doorstep and demanded money on January 8 2018, exactly a year before the murder. She was told “something would happen to her or her son if they did not pay”.

In the summer of 2018, the family moved to east London to escape Nottingham’s gangs. He had been excluded from school in Nottingham and enrolled down south at a school in Chingford, Essex. The promise of a bright new start was in fact just the prelude to his murder.

His aunt Tesfa Green said the family had battled to keep him safe.  “My family radiate love. We adored Jaden. I could give you a list longer than my arm of our attempts to safeguard Jaden,” she said, “Like when my sister painstakingly home schooled him after he was excluded from school in Nottingham, when he went to Jamaica to spend the summer with his dad so he could be a safe distance away from exploitative adults, when my sister was begging for support from children’s services.”

Almost a year on, Jaden’s family remain distraught. In the bloodiest year in London in a decade, Jaden was the youngest victim of drug gang wars. As he lay dying, the paramedics battling to save his life, Jaden had asked for his mother. He was at heart a little boy who had pretended to be a gangster.