Courage in the face of grief

Brooke Kinsella on how Damilola dad inspired her fight

- ROS WYNNE-JONES

It was a remarkable moment when two bereaved people came together and shared their pain. In front of the Eros statue at Piccadilly Circus, there were just two people hugging - Richard Taylor, father of the murdered schoolboy Damilola, and Brooke Kinsella, grieving sister of teenage Ben.

Two boys who never met, and yet by September 2008 had come to symbolise the pain of all the boys killed that brutal London summer.

"I'll never forget the powerful moment during the peace march in 2008 when, walking for opposite ends of London, our paths crossed in Piccadilly," Brooke says now. "We instinctively embraced. That single moment symbolised the unyielding solidarity of our movement and our shared mission to prevent violence."

Ben, 16, had been murdered on his way home from a night out just three months earlier, and Brooke's pain was still raw. Richard had lost Damilola aged 10 to a vicious attack in a Peckham stairwell eight years earlier, though he told me he felt the pain of that loss on waking every single day.

He had also only just lost his wife Gloria, who passed away in April that year two months before Ben had been murdered. Gloria had never recovered from the loss of her Dami, and had died eight years later from a heart attack.