My son was groomed by drug dealers and killed, but my pleas for help were ignored

The mother of a 15-year-old boy stabbed to death on a south London street has accused social services of failing to help get her son away from drug dealers who had groomed him.

Speaking to BBC Panorama, Daejaun Campbell's mother, Jodian Taylor, says despite her pleas for help, Greenwich Council refused to accept that Daejaun met the threshold for social services help until it was too late, and then failed to provide the support the family needed.

"There were so many opportunities to have safeguarded him, protected him, and they failed him," she says.

Social workers and police officers knew Daejaun was being exploited. One of his killers, 17-year-old Imri Doue, was also known by authorities to be a victim of child criminal exploitation.

Panorama has seen evidence that:

• A Greenwich social worker eventually assigned to Daejaun's case failed to turn up to two crucial meetings in the weeks before he was killed
• When Jodian emailed social services to say she was desperate for help, they failed to reply, until she chased them again a week later
• The day after the murder, the council emailed Jodian to rearrange one of the meetings, unaware that Daejaun had been murdered

Daejaun was attacked on a street in Woolwich on the afternoon of 22 September 2024.

He was stabbed in the leg with a "zombie" knife, severing an artery, and he died at the scene. Paramedics found drugs packaged for sale in his underwear. As they tried to save him, he called out: "I'm 15, don't let me die."

It is thought Daejaun was targeted as part of a dispute between two drug dealers. He was carrying drugs for one of the dealers, who had groomed him.

Daejaun lived locally with his mother and his two brothers. His father died when Daejaun was seven.

Jodian remembers her son as a happy child, eager to learn, but she suspected something was wrong when Daejaun's behaviour changed in his early teens.

She believes friends from secondary school introduced Daejaun to older boys who, in turn, groomed him into selling drugs.

It can be all too easy for teenagers in inner city areas to get involved in this lifestyle, says Michael Jibowu, a former gang member from Woolwich. He served a sentence of two years and eight months for stabbing a teenager and now campaigns to raise awareness about knife crime.

"Imagine being a young boy and you want to make money. The drug dealers are about, they have cars, they have chains, they have watches," he says. "It's very, very easy to get involved in selling drugs... Sometimes you can say literally nothing and they will approach you."

Daejaun always wanted to be wealthy, says Jodian. She remembers telling him he had to find ways of making money legitimately: "But then you find that the influence on the outside was greater than mine."

Since Daejaun's death, pictures and videos have emerged of him holding cash and drugs during the period he was being exploited.

"Those pictures break my heart," says Jodian, "because... that's not the person I raised. He's unfamiliar to me."

Daejaun had made a choice, she says, but adults were exploiting him for their own financial gain.

In 2023, Jodian raised her concerns with his school, Woolwich Polytechnic for Boys.

It arranged counselling for Daejaun and asked Greenwich Council to provide help for the family.

However, Jodian says she remains critical of the school for not sharing important information with her about who Daejaun was mixing with.

Some of his friends had been barred from school grounds, but the school did not tell Jodian why.

She says she later found out it was because of their links to drug distribution and weapons.

Woolwich Polytechnic's head of safeguarding, Jo Lumbis, says: "I wouldn't have been able to tell her about the drugs and the knives because that child is entitled to confidentiality. I can't give that information to parents."

Jodian says she is not satisfied with this explanation.

"I wasn't asking for people's names and addresses," she says. "I was asking for the tools to keep my son safe. That was vital information and it wasn't shared with me."

Greenwich Council's response to the situation made Jodian feel desperate and not listened to, she says.

The council had provided youth workers to support the family, but she said that this approach was not working. Jodian asked the council to move Daejaun out of the area to keep him safe. The council told her he didn't qualify for that level of intervention.

Meanwhile, Daejaun was being drawn deeper into danger, she says. He would go missing for days, even weeks. He was also arrested for possession with intent to supply cannabis.

Jodian told the youth workers what had happened and asked Daejaun's school for help.

Jo Lumbis says the school tried to engage with social services a number of times - "there were a lot of meetings," she says.

Daejaun's case came up several times in 2024 when local schools, the police and the council met to discuss children at risk of exploitation.

Each organisation has a legal duty to work together to protect children.

But that didn't result in more help for Jodian and her son, she says.

Once Greenwich Council finally accepted that Daejaun qualified for more intensive support, a new social worker missed crucial meetings to plan how to keep him safe.

"I was constantly trying to contact the social services but the social worker failed to turn up to two meetings," says Jodian.

Two weeks before Daejaun was murdered, he went missing again. To try to force social services to act, Jodian told them she was prepared to give up her parental responsibility for him.

She heard nothing back.

Jodian emailed social services again a week later, saying Daejaun needed to be "re-homed" and that she had "completely lost control" of him.

In response, she received an email asking for her phone number - something the council already had.

On 23 September 2024, social services emailed Jodian to rearrange a crucial meeting.

But it was a day too late. Police were now looking for Daejaun's killers.

In October 2025, Imri Doue was found guilty of his murder and sentenced to 21 years in prison. Marko Balaz, who was 19, received an 11-year sentence for manslaughter.

Like Daejaun, Doue was known to the Metropolitan Police and Greenwich Council as a victim of grooming.

In sentencing Doue, the judge said it was "extremely depressing to note" that he had been "sucked into the world of gangs and knife crime".

An estimated 15,500 children in England and Wales are thought to be "at risk of or involved in criminal exploitation", according to the Home Office.

Within weeks of Daejaun's murder, a friend of his, 14-year-old Kelyan Bokassa, was also murdered just over a mile away. He too had been groomed.

The Met Police told Panorama: "Our thoughts remain firmly with Kelyan and Daejaun's families as they continue to navigate the unimaginable grief of losing a loved one in such a senseless and violent way."

It says its priority is "not only to bring offenders to justice but also to continue to safeguard young and vulnerable people who are at risk of being exploited through gang crime and drugs. This approach has been effective and teenage homicides in London have fallen by three-quarters since 2021".

Greenwich Council says that it understands the "anger and devastation" of the parents of Daejaun and Kelyan, and that while knife crime "is not a problem specific to Greenwich", it is "appalled by the violence that took place".

Because of two ongoing safeguarding reviews, the council says it is "still unable to comment" on the circumstances around the murders.

It says the reviews will be published by the end of March.

No-one has yet been brought to justice for grooming Daejaun or Kelyan.

Many experts believe the system for dealing with child criminal exploitation is not working properly at present, and children are slipping through the cracks.

The government's Crime and Policing Bill, currently in the Lords, will make child criminal exploitation a specific offence.

The Children's Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, thinks more needs to be done to tackle the problem.

"Too often children are not listened to by the professionals in their lives who miss the warning signs, or who fail to respond to the abuse from groomers who use fear as their influence," she says. "Tragically this can lead to victims being ignored, or even punished as offenders, instead of being protected."

She wants to see a system that puts children first, she says, one where police, social care, education and health professionals are better trained to spot exploitation early, and act together to tackle it.

Drug dealers are looking for other Daejauns or Kelyans, says Michael Jibowu, "and they won't stop until they find someone".

He says: "It is an endless cycle, and until somebody puts their hand up and says 'something has to give,' it's going to keep going."

Jodian says she is trying to stay strong for Daejaun's brothers, even though she still feels angry.

"I want to raise awareness," she says. "I don't want another mum, another family, to feel the pain that mine's going through, for another child to have their future snatched away from them."