TWO BELFAST men have been convicted of the 2005 murder of schoolboy Thomas Devlin.
The 15-year-old Catholic was knifed during an attack by Nigel James Brown (26) and Gary Taylor (23) on Belfast’s Somerton Road in front of two friends, one of whom was also stabbed.
It took the Belfast Crown Court jury of eight men and four women just one hour and 25 minutes to convict Brown, from the Whitewell Road, and Taylor, from nearby Mountcollyer Avenue.
During their five-week trial, the court heard Brown confessed to his stepfather he’d been involved in an argument with the three teenage friends, and saw Taylor stab the schoolboy “in a frenzy”.
Brown also claimed that when they both left their then homes in Ross House in the loyalist Mount Vernon flats complex to walk a dog, he had no idea that Taylor had armed himself with a knife.
However, Toby Hedworth, prosecuting, maintained their intentions that night were “crystal clear” – to find “soft targets” after going out together “tooled up”.
Mr Hedworth claimed Brown’s admission to being at the scene was little more than “a damage limitation exercise”, while Taylor’s supposed alibi of being elsewhere smoking dope with friends had “melted away like the snow”.
Taylor protested his innocence as he and accomplice Brown were both jailed for life. The 23-year-old shouted from the dock that “suspicion does not prove guilt”.
Mr Justice McLaughlin thanked the jury of eight men and four women for their verdicts, which he described as being “entirely in accordance with the evidence”.
Mr Justice McLaughlin said it “was a murder which completely shocked this entire community, but especially the community of north Belfast”.
The judge said Thomas Devlin and his friends “were attacked without any reason or provocation whatever”. Turning to address Taylor directly, Mr Justice McLaughlin said: “It is plain that you, Gary Taylor, were the principal . . . you are the killer.”
Mr Justice McLaughlin said to Taylor he could shake his head “all you like, but this country, with its democratic system and system for fair trials, has heard all of the evidence, considered all of the facts and has determined your guilt”. Taylor shouted: “Suspicion does not prove guilt.”
Mr Justice McLaughlin told him: “You thought you had got away with it, but you have been convicted and you will pay a heavy price for what you did on the Somerton Road. You will go to prison for life. And you will have a tariff fixed . . . It will be a very lengthy tariff, you can be sure,” warned the judge.
Turning to Brown, and just before jailing him for life, Mr Justice McLaughlin told him he’d played “a secondary” role.
He said his “conviction demonstrates that those who engage in violence willingly must take full responsibility not just for what they do themselves, but for the actions of others that they go about with and with whom they act in concert”.
Det Chief Supt Tim Hanley, who headed the investigation, praised the verdicts. He described the stabbing as “a savage attack on a schoolboy who’d gone out with some friends to buy sweets at a local shop on a summer’s night”.
Chief Supt Hanley said he wished to thank “the community, on all sides of the community, for working with the police and for standing up and giving evidence”.
Outside court, Thomas Devlin’s mother Penny Holloway read from a statement describing her son as “a normal 15-year-old teenager with his whole life ahead of him, with ambitions and dreams for his future. He was a kind and generous and much-loved son and brother with a great sense of humour, and as one of his friends said, Thomas could make fun out of doing nothing. On the night that he was killed he was with his friends walking home believing that he was safe – he had no reason to believe otherwise.
“Gary Taylor killed Thomas, but we still have no idea why, and we probably will never know.”
Standing beside Thomas’s father Jim Devlin, Ms Holloway said: “Thomas is in our thoughts every day. We all miss him very much and whilst this trial brings his killers to their rightful place in prison, we would much prefer to have Thomas alive.”
She criticised Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service over their initial decision not to prosecute. She said the Devlin family was seeking a meeting with Lord Chief Justice Declan Morgan to discuss the handling of the case.