And then. 7am, 28th of September 1985, I remember hearing a thump. A noise that just woke me out of my sleep. Woke up. And I saw my mum walking towards the door. So I thought, ‘Whatever it is, mum’s taking care of it.’ And I laid back down.

And then I heard a loud bang this time. I jumped up. I saw my mum on the floor. I saw a man with a gun in his hand. And then I just heard my mum say in a very faint voice, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t feel my legs, and I think I’m gonna die.’ So, hearing that, I stood on top of the bed, so I was eye-to-eye to the person who had the gun. And I just felt this rage that I’d never, ever felt in my whole entire life.

I was screaming and shouting at this man, ‘What have you done to my mum? What have you done to my mum?’ And he pointed his gun at me and said, like, ‘Someone better shut this fucking kid up.’

And it was only in that moment I realised this, this was a police officer.

My dad was in the room at the time and he tried to calm me down. And I thought, if my dad scared, because he had fear in his face, then this is serious because he used to be in the army.

We got rushed out of the bedroom. I was joined by the rest of my siblings. Lisa, eight. Juliet, who was 21 and six months’ pregnant. And it felt like someone had just picked up my house and shook it upside down. I just remember seeing about 30 police officers in the house, guns, dogs, you know. And all we were worried about as children is my mum. Nobody could tell us whether she was gonna be alright or not. She got rushed to the hospital, accompanied by my father, and we were left in the house.

My name’s Lee Lawrence. I’m the son of Cherry Groce, who’s part of the Windrush generation. My mum was born in Jamaica, a place called Portland, and it’s where the Maroons came from. So my mum’s actually part of the Maroon tribe in Jamaica.

My earliest memory of my mum, when she’s laughing, she would laugh until she would cry. She would hit something when she was laughing, you know. So you’d see the tears coming down my mum’s face and that’s how much she would be laughing. And it would be so uncontrollable she’d have to hit the bed, hit her leg, tap something, you know.

And I could always tell what mood she was in, depending on what music she was playing at the time. We went to sleep with music playing. Music was always in the background.

What other sounds would I say reminds me of my mum. Probably her voice and her strong patois. She came to England when she was 14. But she spoke like she just came here. The culture meant a lot to her. She really held on to that.

Just like most people coming here it was about the Motherland and opportunities to work and help build back up. But her memories were so vivid of Jamaica. She spoke about it as if it was paradise. I could picture Jamaica before I even went there. I could just picture what it looked like through the way that she would talk about it. There was the hardship and she spoke about that too. But I think the beauty of the place and the culture and the people outweighed the hardship, when I heard her speak about it.

We all grew up together, roughing it. But at the same time, even in the most toughest and difficult times, we would always find joy and laughter, and we still have that up to today.

There was always people in my house. My mum would always cook more than enough because she always had this thing that anyone could knock the door, and you’ve always got to be able to feed somebody.

Every Saturday we had Saturday soup. So it would either be chicken soup or lamb soup or red pea soup. And I used to always ask my mum to cook stewed chicken because that was like, my favorite dish that she used to cook. But she’d cook everything. Oxtail, curried goat, you know, all the Caribbean dishes. Every day we had something different to eat.

My mum would take in people. So people would come and stay at our house if they were going through hard times. And energy-wise it was exciting. It, growing up in Brixton for me, you know, we had the village mentality. So we all knew each other. In and out of each other’s houses. All my mum’s friends were my aunties and uncles. It was around the Rastafarian movement so I remember seeing Black people greeting each other as brother and sister. So it was rich in culture. We all looked out for each other. There was a sense that the community was policing the community back then.
So, as a child growing up in Brixton at that time, I loved it. It felt like we were all in it together.

At the time, so. When my mom was shot, we were kind of cocooned in the house. And the people came to the house and started to ask questions about what happened. And they weren’t getting no answers. So they marched to Brixton. And by the time they left my house, it spread like wildfire in the community.

People were responding to an injustice. That’s what happened. But I couldn’t even think about what was going on outside. I was just consumed with how our mum’s gonna be.

And then a friend of mine came to the house and he said, ‘Lee, do you see in Brixton? Do you see what’s happened? You need to come down there. You need to go and see what happened.’

And I’m walking down towards Brixton and seeing the, kind of, aftermath. And it just felt like Brixton had been bombed. It was just the smell of smoke and burning tires and as I got closer and closer to the main part of Brixton, it just became more frightening.
It’s like a double whammy. There’s what’s happened to my mum, and then what’s happened to my community, you know. So there’s like a double sadness. I couldn’t connect in that moment to the solidarity. It was just devastation after devastation. And as time went on, I started to understand and to take comfort from the fact that the community stood up for us and that was their way of expressing it.

My mum was so social. She loved her music, she loved to dance, she loved to mingle, she loved to mix. And as a result of what happened to her she was left paralysed from essentially the chest down. So I became a young carer. But my mum was determined to rehabilitate. I saw her get up every day. I saw her trying to cook still. Sometimes see my mum with the hoover in her wheelchair, right? So I learned very early what never giving up looks like.

And she always attributed her strength to the fact that she was a Maroon that resided in Jamaica. She always said, ‘I’m a Maroon and strength is in my blood.’

What happened to my mum was wrong. It wasn’t an accident. It was an injustice. And the police were the ones responsible for that. When she passed, that’s why I fought so hard to have what happened to her recognised because she deserved that, you know. Although she would never have said, ‘I wanted that for myself.’ I knew that she deserved that.

So that was my purpose. In proving that in the inquest and then going to the High Court and fighting to have the police take accountability for it as well. And now, it’s a public record that the police were wrong, that they’ve apologised for that, and that they’ve taken some accountability. And although we didn’t get justice in the formal way, nobody went to prison, it wasn’t punished or penalised, we claim justice in the form of restorative justice. And the memorial in Windrush Square represents that restorative justice. It’s an honour to my mum, but also to the community who rose up for that injustice.

Now it’s recognised in a different way. The way the story’s spoken about, to say, ‘Once upon a time, this happened. This is why it happened.’ And to redeem those people who would have been classified as hooligans, but were really the heroes of our community and had the courage to stand up for what happened to my mum. It’s allowed us to bring more understanding, more empathy, and the work’s ongoing.