A horticultural student was stabbed to death by a group of 14 and 15 year olds as punishment for goading older gang members over Snapchat.
Jacob Abraham, 15, wrote on the app “if you want to mess with me, come mess with me around my yard” as a challenge to the local drug dealers from AP or Albany Park Gang who saw him as a rival.
These drug dealers then recruited the five teens to “torture” their victim to protect the “county lines” drug business.
Kai Fisher Dixon, Tremayne Gray, Shuayb Mahomud, Abdulqaliq Mohamed, Omarian Stephens, all now 15 years old, lured and then attacked Jacob Abraham in an alleyway where he dealt cannabis near his home on December 7, 2017.
He bleed to death after being stabbed eight times in the legs and once in the arm with at least two different knives in the two minute long attack .
Despite trying to run away from his attackers, Jacob collapsed and died at the scene in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, where his older brother Isaac found him dying.
CCTV from various locations showed the five youths running from the scene and they were also captured together boarding a bus travelling towards the alleyway.
Three of the murderers had to change from their school uniforms before committing the killing.
At St Albans Crown Court on June 25 all five were found guilty of the murder by joint enterprise and today at the Old Bailey all five were jailed for life.
Stephens and Gray, who were the ones holding the knives were handed minimum terms of 14 years, Mohamed was given 13 years and both Fisher Dixon and Mahomud, all of Enfield, north London, will serve 12 years in prison.
The AP gang were part of the larger Get Money Gang and were taking out revenge against Jacob, who they saw as a rival because he sold cannabis in the alleyway behind his house.
The court heard Grey, Stephens and Mohamed, had previous convictions for carrying a knife months before the murder and Fisher Dixon had taken a knife into school and was expelled.
Sentencing Mr Justice Andrew Edis lifted a reporting restriction banning the naming of the teen killers.
He said: “I’m satisfied nobody who was there intended to kill Jacob Abraham, it seems to me that what was intended was what can be properly described as tourture – multiple stab wounds to someone’s legs to punish him.
“I think they intended to leave him alive, in considerable pain, and humiliated.
“This was a gang-related killing promoted by older and more sophisticated members of the gang who have not been brought to justice.
“It’s important members of the community know that. It’s important that the 14 year old boys see there is a price to be paid for joining up to the gang.
“The public need to know how gangs recruit young boys to carry out drug dealing and violence that is part of the county lines business.
“This was an AP gang punishment mission. Jacob had challenged the gang on social media and to ‘come to his yard’ and that’s exactly what happened.
“The ‘olders’ decided he needed to be taught a lesson as he was showing ‘disrespect’.
“This was a premeditated and savage attack, carefully planned out killing to demonstrate gang power.
“These boys came from loving and supportive homes but were brought up in a culture of organised crime and are themselves victims of the gang’s brutal regime.”
Jacob had been making sandwiches for the homeless the day of his murder and his mother Sheba Abraham said in written victim statement that Jacob’s father, Solomon, was an award-winning chef who died when the boy was just nine-year-old.
She told the court: “I still struggle to believe what has happened.
“He was my whole life and he was taken from me that day.
“I have been unable to sleep. Those people ruined our lives. They will still be able to see their families and will one day be released.”
