The devastated parents of a teenager who was killed after being groomed by a county lines gang have warned that ‘any child’ could fall into the same trap, as a video emerged of him being pursued by his killers moments before his death.
Joe Dix became entangled in a ‘vicious cycle’ after he was approached in a park aged 15 to courier a package for cash, eventually dealing Class A drugs.
The teenager was killed in January last year after a county lines member called in his help to stop three drug dealers from burgling a known crack den.
Horrifying footage shows Joe running from Benjamin Gil, Cameron Palmer and Hans Beeharry in Norwich before they stabbed him seven times.
On Wednesday his killers, who were all in their teens when they killed Joe, were incarcerated for a total of more than 60 years.
Joe’s mother Emma Dix, 47, told a newspaper outlet: ‘Don’t be blind. This can happen in front of your eyes. It could be any child. Don’t think it won’t be yours’.
She went on to say that it was unthinkable that a child should die before their parents, and how could she possibly tell how it felt not to be able to protect her child?
Mrs Dix, who’s on medication for post-traumatic stress disorder, said in a victim impact statement, which was read in court, that listening to the horrific details of the incident that led to her son’s death and seeing the body map images of all his injuries was dreadful.
She continued that nothing compared to the shocking footage of Joe running for his life, being chased, followed by the heartbreaking scene of him collapsing and that she couldn’t tell how many times those scenes had replayed over and over in their heads.
The family endured further pain after Joe’s death when internet trolls sent offensive messages, some in the dead boy’s name, and a memorial green near where he died in Vale Green was also desecrated.
Friends said there was no reason to think that Joe would end up working with a county lines gang.
The sports fan lived with his father Phil, a carpenter, and his mother, a hospital radiographer, in a four-bedroom house in the village of Salhouse.
He was predicted good grades, played football four times a week and regularly took part in matches for Sprowston Cricket Club. All this fell away when he became involved in drug dealing.
I don’t even suppose the police even bothered at all with these gangs.
It’s absolutely heartbreaking for the family because nobody expects their child to be taken, and it must have taken all their strength to tell their story.
This country is a farce as far as sentencing goes. They should have all got life imprisonment.
The problem is, that this country has encouraged a work-shy society and tedium. There are no places for these teenagers to go, no clubs and they become bored. Of course, there were always those that fell through the net and went into crime, but now crime is the club, where teenagers hang out together and cause devastation and death.
This is literally a mother’s worst nightmare, and it’s so scary if you have teenagers, especially boys. This was a horrific crime that deserves more jail time, and it’s so sad that there’s no longer such a thing as British justice in our once-great country. Life should mean life, not twenty years.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 