Teenager murdered and stripped naked in the street after gun-fire attack in Chapeltown, court told
A teenager was stabbed 17 times and stripped naked before being dragged into the road to die by a masked gang, a court has been told.
Emmanuel Nyabako died from “catastrophic” bleeding minutes after the attack in Chapeltown in August last year.
Three men are on trial at Leeds Crown Court for his murder. Emile Riggon, 23, Jozeffi Jeffers, 28, and Phillip Bryant, 33, all deny killing the 19-year-old. A fourth defendant, 35-year-old Charlotte Armitage is the girlfriend of Bryant and is charged with assisting an offender. Another suspect, 29-year-old Louis Grant remains at large.
Opening the case on Thursday, prosecutor Mark McKone KC said that at 2am on August 26 last year, three 999 calls were made to police that a gang of males wearing balaclavas were attacking a man with sticks and knives near to Albion House on Francis Street.
At 2.28am the police arrived and found Mr Nyabako laying in the middle of the road fatally injured and wearing nothing but a snood. He had been strippped after the attack and “dragged or carried” into the middle of the road. Despite the help of arriving paramedics, he was pronounced dead at 3.03am.
A postmortem found that Mr Nyabako suffered 17 “sharp force injuries” to his face, forearms, back and chest. One of the chest wounds had cut a heart muscle which caused arterial damage and the subsequent bleeding which led to his death.
Mr McKone said: “Emmanuel Nyabako was murdered in a joint attack. Each of the three defendants were involved in that joint attack and each shared an intention to cause really serious bodily harm.”
The Crown claims that the men went looking for Mr Nyabako following an earlier incident in which a gun was fired at two cars. Various CCTV footage pieced together by investigators showed Mr Nyaboko and a second male were on an e-bike in the early hours of August in the Chapeltown area.
The jury were shown footage that appeared to show Mr Nyabako holding a machete-type knife, with the other male holding a pistol. Other footage showed the gang of defendants in two cars also in the area.
The second male was able to flee the gang but Mr Nyabako was brutally attacked. He was still holding the machete at the time. That was later recovered along with two pistols.
Mr McKone said: “They meted out the most savage punishment for what he [Mr Nyabako] had done. They acted as a team. This was taking the law into their own hands.”
But he conceded that had Mr Nyabako survived the assault, he too would have been prosecuted “in all probability”.
The Crown says that Bryant, of Skinner lane, Leeds, had torched a Seat Leon that he had driven to Leeds that night. After the killing he drove it to near Sheffield to distance it from the murder scene, then set fire to it. However, his phone was picked up by a mast in that area of Sheffield at the time.
Mr McKone said Armitage, of Moor Hill Road, Salendine Nook, Huddersfield, helped Bryant after the killing by picking him up in a BMW. It is alleged that she also deleted conversations on her phone between them in a bid to cover their tracks.
Riggon, of no fixed address, was arrested after he touched down on a flight from Turkey in November last year. Mr McKone said his DNA was later found on the body of Mr Nyabako.
Meanwhile, Jeffers, of Hyde Park Road, Leeds, was arrested from an address in the city on November 14.
The trial continues.