Jonathan Matondo: No justice for family of boy, 16, gunned down in Sheffield gang war

Just a few years after leaving the Democratic Republic of Congo to begin a new life in Sheffield, the 16-year-old was killed in October 2007 in what is believed to have been a feud between two rival postcode gangs operating in the city at the time.

Jonathan had said goodbye to his mum as she went to church, and that was the last time she had seen her beloved son.

She had thought Jonathan was meeting up with a group of friends.

The teenager’s family had believed that he had wanted to become a church preacher, but he was leading a secret life they knew nothing about. He was a gang member who was known to have carried a gun and a blade and he was known on the streets as Venomous.

Although nobody is behind bars for Jonathan’s murder, detectives revealed what they believed happened to him when they charged a suspect soon after the killing and he was prosecuted.

He stood trial twice, with the jury unable to reach a verdict after the first trial and finding him not guilty after a second.

The South Yorkshire Police murder investigation led to the discovery that Jonathan had been a member of the S3 gang operating in Burngreave and Pitsmoor at that time, and which had been at war with the S4 gang from the same area.

Jonathan was shot dead at the Nottingham Cliff recreation ground in Burngreave.

It later transpired that there had been another failed attempt to kill Jonathan earlier that day when shots had been fired at him as he visited a friend’s flat nearby.

The killing is believed to have been a revenge attack after the house of an S4 gang member’s relatives was fired at the night before.

Detectives said they believed that Jonathan’s murderer did not act alone and that the teen was killed as part of a pre-planned plot.

Police chiefs said Jonathan was ‘targeted and ruthlessly killed’ in an ‘organised and planned attack’ and that officers would ‘relentlessly pursue’ those involved.

They said at the time that regardless of who pulled the trigger, all those there and aware of the planned attack were just as culpable and would face murder charges if identified. To this day, nobody else has ever been charged.

Forensic work established that the gun used to kill Jonathan had been used to fire at another S3 member's home two months earlier.

In the two years before Jonathan’s murder, police compiled a dossier of 38 incidents involving the feuding gangs, and a number of firearms were seized.

There had been a series of stabbings, shootings and tit-for-tat attacks leading up to the killing.

Some 17 years on since the fatal shooting, Jonathan’s murder is one of a number of unsolved cases on South Yorkshire Police’s books, with the force having a specialist review team which re-examines historic killings to look for potential new leads.

Anyone with information should call South Yorkshire Police on 101.