I wanted revenge now I'm fighting to end the violence

WHEN Tim Edwards’ daughter Elle was killed in the crossfire of a senseless gang war, understandably he wanted retribution.

- MATT ROPER

The 26-year-old beautician was an innocent bystander caught up in a dispute that had nothing to do with her.

Her loving dad Tim was so angry, he wanted to burn to the ground the pub where she was shot dead.

But as he closely followed the police investigation, he kept thinking back to something a customer once said to him.

Fifteen years before Elle was killed, Tim was working as a plasterer’s labourer in an armed police officer’s house in Liverpool.

Eleven-year-old Rhys Jones had recently been shot dead crossing a pub car park in the same city on his way home from football practice.

Tim recalls: “We were talking about gun crime in Liverpool and how little had changed since the murder. And [the client] said to me, ‘Mark my words, there will be another Rhys Jones’.

“Elle was only about 12 at the time. I never imagined that man might have been talking about her.”

After Elle’s murder on Christmas Eve 2022, the dad of four remembered that officer’s prediction.

Pushing aside his desire for revenge, Tim decided he must do something to stop the cycle of violence.

And now, with shootings in Liverpool on the rise again, he is preparing to go into some of the city’s toughest communities and tell teenagers tempted by drugs gangs that there is a better way to live.

Tim says: “It’s still too easy to get access to a firearm. Young people are still being enticed into drug gangs.

“I lost Elle but nothing has changed, just like with Rhys. I feel it’s inevitable that more families will go though what we have. These kids need to know that this is not a game, it’s not Grand Theft Auto. If you run around with a gun in your pocket, the chances are that you are going to use it, and someone’s going to get killed.”

Elle died instantly when she was shot twice in the back of the head by a masked gunman who opened fire on the car park of the Lighthouse pub in Wallasey Village, Wirral.