18 years ago,

Greg O’Keefe did an excellent piece 5 years ago.

Long read but worth it.
The whole tragedy shows the worst and best of humankind.

Life without Rhys – Steve Jones on the tragedy and legacy of his son

By Greg O'Keeffe

Amid the trauma, shock and white noise of police and media frenzy, Steve Jones had a decision to make.
Three days after his little boy was shot and killed, he found himself staring at the three season tickets in his kitchen, wondering what to do.
Did he and his oldest son Owen, Goodison regulars along with 11-year-old Rhys, go to the match?
What did football mean now? What did Everton mean? What did anything mean in the black hole of grief that had opened up around his family after Rhys was caught in the cross-fire of a gang dispute as he walked home from football training on August 22, 2007?
There were no answers. So, in the end, they went. Everton drew 1-1 with Blackburn Rovers, James McFadden equalising late in the game. For 90 minutes, if not respite, Steve and Owen found some breathing space.
“We’d talked about it and we just knew Rhys would want us to go,” Steve says. “That’s all he wanted to do — go and watch Everton and then kick the ball around in the garden. So we felt we needed to go, for Rhys more than anything else.”
With the 13th anniversary of Rhys’s death approaching, Steve spoke to The Athletic about football, grief, and how Everton helped him heal following a tragedy that gripped the nation and threatened to overwhelm his family.
The Jones boys used to sit in the Top Balcony. High up in the Main Stand, near the roof, they’d watch the team they love, week in, week out, with a panoramic view.
“It used to be just special occasions that we’d go when the kids were really young,” says Steve, 57, who himself was born into a family of Evertonians.
“It was my dad that really got Owen interested in going to Everton and we’d take them for treats, or around Christmas. That’s how it progressed until we could afford to get season tickets. It’s a lot more relaxed up in the Top Balcony, or it used to be. We’d sat all around the ground before that and the Top Balcony was a bit more subdued. It’s like you’re watching it on the telly up there.
“We had three tickets but there was usually room to shuffle about. Because the guy in front of Rhys used to be quite small, we’d sit him there so he could see the game even though they weren’t our designated seats.”
Rhys, Steve recalls, was a “normal” boy, infatuated with playing football and supporting Everton. The former coach at his junior football team, Fir Tree FC, has referred to him as “the star of his side”.
“Who knows where he’d have gone?” says Steve, as we reflect on his boy’s potential in the sport. “Certainly from the videos you watch, he plays a good game. You’d like to have thought he could go on to become professional, but you never know. Every parent thinks their child is gifted.
“He loved Andy Johnson and Mikel Arteta, but he liked them all. We always said he was going to be a Roberto Carlos when he grew up because he was only small of stature and he was left-footed. He idolised the Everton players. He had a few posters of Wayne Rooney (they hail from the same part of Liverpool — Croxteth) and a signed thing in his room until he joined United and then he put a photo of Tony Hibbert over it.”
Rhys was a lovable child. His dad describes his flicker of boyish mischief tempered by an innocence that meant nobody; parents, teachers or coaches, could stay cross with him.
“I remember we were heading home from a game once,” he says. “We were on the East Lancs Road and we’d beaten West Ham 1-0. Rhys was sat in the back and we stopped next to a West Ham coach at the lights. Suddenly, Rhys is holding up a one and a zero with his hands to the lads on the coach. I’m going, ‘Pack it in, Rhys! Pack it in’, but the lads were laughing.
“He would be in trouble because he’d done something and then he’d just make you laugh. That was Rhys.”
“Going to the match was escapism and normalisation all rolled into one,” says Steve. “If anything could, it allowed us to feel that bit more normal for a while — normal for us and for Owen to see that life was going on.
“It was something Rhys would have wanted. He’d have never missed a game, regardless of how bad we’d play. He was passionate about it.”
Owen, five years Rhys’s senior, was preparing to study for his A-Levels when his little brother died. Naturally, Steve worried about him. In those early days after the tragedy, the pair continued to go to matches. Sometimes, Rhys’s mother Melanie would go and sit in her youngest’s empty seat. When it became too painful for her, another relative or family friend would go.
At that point, the Jones’s lives were in a surreal bubble. Merseyside Police were trying to catch Rhys’s killers (gang member Sean Mercer, who was 16 years old at the time of the incident, was convicted of murder and jailed for life in 2008), and media interest around the case was intense.
“The temptation is there just to hide away but that’s not what he would have wanted,” recalls Steve. “How can I put it..? We wanted to be there (at Goodison). We had this urge to go. Although our thoughts were never far from Rhys, it does give you some brief form of release; it gets you out.
“Back then, we were sort of like on a lockdown with everything going on with the police and everything like that. We needed to get out of our own four walls.”
The family live in the Croxteth area of Liverpool, near to the Fir Tree pub, where Rhys was shot. It was an ordinary suburban district that became riven by reprisal attacks between young gangs.
“We had a police car sat outside the house every day,” says Steve, a manager for Tesco. “At the time we didn’t know what we were dealing with; we knew it was gangs, but we didn’t know what they were after or whether they’d come after us. The police were on the doorstep and so many things are running through your head. Then we were trying to make arrangements for the funeral too.
“We’d been assigned two family liaison officers, who were middle men between us and Dave Kelly (the lead detective on the case, who would be portrayed by Stephen Graham in Little Boy Blue, ITV’s BAFTA-winning drama about the killing).
“To save Dave coming out all the time to update us, the liaison officers were here every day. There’d always be things they needed to pass on to us: ‘Someone’s offered you a holiday in Scotland’ or ‘Someone’s invited you here’. ‘Someone’s painted you a picture’. ‘Someone wants to do an interview or a photoshoot’… They deal with it for us. Nobody had a means of getting hold of us.
“They would say to us, ‘Do you want to speak to the Mail or the Mirror (newspapers)?’ It got to the point they knew what the answer was going to be and they’d bat them off for us. There are a lot of kind people out there and a lot of thoughtful people. I remember an old fella came round to the house once and he had a box of tea bags and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits.
“Then there was a woman who popped over with a big lasagne she’d cooked. She said, ‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through and you might not want to eat but I’ve cooked this’. It wasn’t our choice to be in this situation but you realise the vast majority of people are good.”
Sometimes, football stadiums are described in spiritual terms. A few are likened to cathedrals. Goodison has its own church; St Luke’s, which invites match-goers in for a cup of tea every match day and lends its vicar to the club.
For three decades until his death last year, that was Harry Ross. A life-long Evertonian, the club came just after God in his heart. Reverend Ross was such an integral part of Everton life, it was no surprise he sought out the Jones’s that first weekend after Rhys’ murder.
“I think sometimes people look to God to have the answer to everything,” says Steve, “to take all this burden away from you. But the first thing Harry Ross said to us was, ‘You’ll never get over it, but you will learn to live with it’ and that still rings true to this day.
“He was great, Harry. We’d speak to him every Christmas. We were invited to go into St Luke’s before the Blackburn game and we’d never been in before. We weren’t sure but we were really glad that we went in to meet him. Harry wasn’t bashing our heads to join the congregation, just giving us words of support. He was someone who dealt with a lot of stuff over the years.”
The reverend made such an impression Melanie and Steve insisted he be involved in Rhys’ funeral, which took place at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral on September 7, 2007. Thousands lined the streets outside to say goodbye, while Rhys’ team-mates attended in their football kits wearing black armbands, alongside many Everton first-team players and staff.
The Z-Cars theme, the stirring music that rings out as Everton take the pitch before every home game, was played on the cathedral’s organ as the coffin, draped in the club crest, was carried inside.
“We had Abide With Me from the FA Cup final and then All Things Bright And Beautiful for the kids to join in,” Steve recalls. “Then it was ‘What do you want going in?’ And we decided on Z-Cars.”
The people outside, many taking time off work to be there, dabbed at their eyes and prayed. The city of Liverpool was united in grief. Steve and Owen, in their Everton shirts, carried Rhys’ little coffin to the hearse afterwards.
As he reflects on it, Steve is thankful for how his oldest son, now 30 and settled with a good job and a partner, coped with it all. “He was doing his A-Levels at the time and the fear was that it could push him off on a different track,” he says. “It was really tough for him but credit to the lad. He went through his A-Levels and then on to university and ended up getting a master’s. It gave him a lot of excuses to fail but he didn’t. He did himself proud.
“After Rhys, we wanted to keep life as normal as possible for him. Although, obviously, there were times that it was impossible to keep him away from everything. If he wanted to come with us to something connected to Rhys then he could, but there was no pressure on him to go.
“We played a few charity games and he joined in with them. But he didn’t like the publicity side of things, the recognition. We kept him as far away from the limelight as we could. It was about trying to keep his routine as normal as possible — going to school, going on holiday. We tried not to wrap him up in cotton wool, which would have been easy to do.
“Mel would worry. She’d say, ‘Keep an eye on him at the game’, but we just couldn’t wrap him in cotton wool for the rest of his life. He had to go out there and sample the big world.”
Years after that heart-rending afternoon at the cathedral, the Jones family returned for a happier occasion; to see Owen receive his master’s degree.
“We’re amazingly proud of him,” says Steve. “It was unrecognisable the way it (the cathedral) was laid out. We sneaked in the back because we didn’t want any attention. You do tend to get recognised out and about. We went for a few beers afterwards. It was a nice day and the right reason to be in the cathedral.”
Three years ago, the family gave their blessing to the creation of a television drama about Rhys’s murder.
It was a project first mentioned to them by Dave Kelly, the detective who sealed the successful case against the gang members responsible and went on to become a family friend.
“I think he’s just had another grandchild a couple of months ago,” says Steve. “We were trying to get out for a pint at some point but COVID has knocked all that on the head for a while.
“He always gets in touch if he’s asked to do anything media-wise about the case. He always comes to us first but we say, ‘Just do what you think is right’. That’s how Little Boy Blue came about. He was approached by the producer. The writer used to come round to ours and sit around on his laptop, tapping away as we spoke.
“The producers were really nice. We just said as long as it was as close to the truth as they could get it, that’s OK. We didn’t want it Hollywood-ised.”
One scene in the drama captures the moment when the family went on to the pitch at Goodison before that Blackburn game for a minute of applause in Rhys’ memory. It was recreated for the cameras during a league game in 2017.
“Paul Whittington, the director, said it was the first time he’s worked with 40,000 extras,” says Steve. “He was amazed that everyone had stayed in their seats for the bits they filmed at half-time. I said, ‘Have you ever tasted the pies at half-time at Goodison?!’
“The producer, Kwadjo (Dajan), said he went straight to the club store after that day and filled a bag full of stuff. He’s a Tottenham fan and he said, ‘Everton are my second team now’. He was thrilled with how that afternoon went. Smitten with it. That’s Goodison, isn’t it?”
Everton’s quaint old home remains part of the Jones’s life. The club is almost extended family. “When we went to Goodison back then, we’d just get a nod of the head. People respected our space,” Steve remembers. “They’d just say, ‘Are you alright?’ and that was it. No intrusions.
“It’s still like that today. If people recognise me and do come over, usually the first thing they’ll say is, ‘Weren’t we shite the other night?’ I’ve bumped into a fella a few times outside Goodison. An oldish fella. He’ll try to give us a bag of sweets and talk about the old times and when we used to win trophies. He even chats about his life; where he’s been.
“It’s a friendly club. It’s not all about trophies and glory, although they’re nice to have. You wouldn’t get 40,000 turning up if it was just about trophies because we haven’t won one for a while. I think it’s a bit more than that.
“We’ve met Bill Kenwright (Everton’s chairman) a few times. He said to us, ‘If there’s anything you need, just say’. After the funeral we went back to Goodison, when they used to have the big tent in the Park End, and they’d done some food and we had a wake of sorts there.”
Even today, strangers leave Everton shirts and other memorabilia beside Rhys’s grave.
The Jones’s story still touches hearts across the city and two footballing tribes (Liverpool played the Z-Cars theme at Anfield in another moving tribute attended by the family after the murder).
“Rhys was just an ordinary young lad who was infatuated with football. It was that normality that resonated with people, I think,” Steve says. “He wasn’t linked with gangs or anything like that. I remember that the first thing the investigators thought after it happened was, ‘The older brother is a dealer or something’, but they ran checks on us all to see if we’d been in trouble with the police, or our family. It just came back as nothing.
“People recognised we’re an ordinary family and they probably saw a bit of their family in us.”
Walk around Goodison on an early-season match day and you will see little boys just like Rhys Jones was, excited in their new kit, holding a parent’s or relative’s hand as they head into the ground in the later summer sun.
Each of those fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters felt Rhys’s death. Everton will never forget him. “I think back to going to the game with the kids and they’d want to go as early as possible,” says Steve, as his mind wanders back to his life before August 2007. “They’d want to get in the ground as soon as it opened and get a programme, sausage roll and a drink.
“It started off with a programme between them, and then they wanted one each. Now just me and Owen will go and have a beer and something to eat, so it’s… different.”
Meanwhile, a few miles away, where the little Blue with the twinkle in his eyes was laid to rest, there are still plenty of visitors from family, relatives and Evertonians.
“We go and see Rhys every week,” says Steve. “Mel sometimes twice a week. Depends on what’s going on. We all remember different things about the people in our lives. Certain things will put a smile on your face; a piece of music or a film and it’ll bring memories flooding back.
“When we’ve been at the cemetery, we’ve had people come over to us and say on a Saturday they will pop over and tell Rhys the score after the game.”
Thirteen years ago in St Luke’s, with sunshine dappling through the stained-glass windows, Harry Ross promised Steve he’d one day learn to live with that unthinkable life without Rhys.
Through love, resilience, and their quiet dignity, he and his family are doing that.
They’ll never get over it. But from high up in the Top Balcony, when a goal goes in and Goodison erupts, Steve thinks of his little boy and knows that is exactly where he’d want him to be.