Gangs by Ross Kemp

Gangs by Ross Kemp

Author:Ross Kemp [Kemp, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-11-15T06:00:00+00:00


As we had learned on our first day in the country, you don’t have to go very far in El Salvador to come across a dead body. On the way back to town we spotted more police activity by the roadside and again stopped. Making our way up a dirt track, we came across a cordoned-off crime scene. Officers were photographing two bodies. The men’s shoes had been taken off, but they still had their socks on. The investigating coroner had just arrived.

There were signs of torture on the half-naked bodies, particularly the small grey-black marks of cigarette burns. Shot through the forehead, a bullet had blown off the back of the first man’s skull. Black flies were busy in the red and grey mess. He had been twenty years old. A second corpse, his twenty-one-year-old brother, had already been bagged up and placed in the back of a flatbed truck. He too had been tortured after going missing the night before. The police told me the brothers had run a bus service for the local people, trying to make their way in life with one ancient bus that they operated on a shoestring. It had been hard for them to make money, he said, not least because they had been paying the 18 Street gang a ‘toll’ for using a section of road.

The evening before the killings, a group of 18 Street members had come calling to demand yet more money. The brothers had refused to pay the increased toll for the simple reason they could not afford it. That night they had been abducted, tortured and then killed. Both made to kneel, one brother had been forced to watch as the gang tortured and then shot the second, before he was tortured and shot in his turn.

The murdered men’s mother was there. She was screaming. It was a high-pitched wail, the kind you only ever hear at the scene of car crashes or at funerals, like an animal losing its cubs. I felt sick. It was one of the very few times in the series I wanted the camera to stop. I asked Andy to turn it off. He quite rightly ignored me – rightly, because showing the reality of what gangs can do was what we were there for. We didn’t film as much as we might have done.

The words rang in my head: ‘A mission is a mission.’ These two innocent, hard-working kids, cut down for the sake of a few bucks a week. A mother’s life destroyed. After the bodies had been removed we walked up to where the brothers had spent their last moments on earth. The imprint of their bodies and some of the blood, brains and skull where they had died, eye to eye, were still there on the grass.



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