Even if he didn't pull the trigger, detectives suspect Lee Amos was involved in the murder of 15-year-old Jessie James in September 2006
It's almost 18 years since Jessie James, a boy of 15, was shot dead as he was riding his bike through a park in Moss Side . He had no involvement in gangs.
On Monday, it was confirmed Amos, aged 48, had died that day at HMP Oakwood in Staffordshire where he was serving life with a minimum 35 years behind bars for a drive-by killing at a wake in 2007, a year after Jessie was shot dead. Perhaps he had no desire to see himself become the aged version of himself GMP had plastered all over billboards across south Manchester to ram home the length of the sentence.
It was on the evening of September 8, 2006, 15-year-old Jessie Marvin James left his home on Greame Street in Moss Side for the last time. He cycled with a group of friends to a party at the West Indian Centre. They tried and failed to get in. The doormen turned them away. They dialled repeatedly until they had the courage to return to Broadfield Park, or The Rec as it was known in Moss Side. Still calling him, they followed the ringtone of Jessie’s mobile and then finally saw its facia lit up on the ground in the darkness. Beside the handset was Jessie’s body at the rear of the Powerhouse youth centre.
But why was Jessie shot and no one else? His tyre tracks showed he had cycled away from his mates and ridden over a small grassy mound, perhaps performing a trick. He had moved away from the pack and would have been an obvious, isolated target. CCTV footage which was later released by police showed two hooded figures cycling away from the park. They were never traced. Police believed one or both had shot Jessie.
One problem was that the cell concerned did not cover Broadfield Park but an adjacent area. Police always suspected there was more than one finger on the trigger, in any event, and Amos was suspected of being involved, perhaps not in the shooting itself, but in arranging for the murder weapon to be delivered and then disposed of following the shooting.
It was only when Amos and fellow Gooch gang leader Colin Joyce were recalled to prison in the months after Jessie’s murder that the rate of shootings – there were 146 recorded firearms incidents in Manchester in 2007 – began to subside. Their key role in creating mayhem in south Manchester was obvious.
Crime Greater Manchester Police
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