The last time Mary Bokassa saw her 14-year-old son alive was around lunchtime, on his first day back to school after Christmas. She had no way of knowing that within an hour and a half, her child would be dead, stabbed 12 times on a bus in broad daylight in Woolwich, south London.

And yet, as his mother explained in a bleak and haunting interview, his death was a shock but not a surprise. Her son Kelyan had been targeted by gang members trying to recruit him since he was six, she told the BBC: “I tried to prevent it. I’ve tried so many, so many times. I screamed it, I said, ‘My son is going to be killed.’” But the family hadn’t, she said, got the help they needed. She had fought for her little boy and she had lost, and there is something about the starkness with which she said it that will have stopped parents across the country in their tracks.

Kelyan was a caring boy, according to his mother, and his teachers called him “funny, kind and ambitious”. But he was not an angel. An aspiring drill rapper, he had been expelled from school, spent time in care, and lately got into trouble with the law. He was on the way to meet his social worker when he died and, according to the BBC, was due in court shortly himself on charges of carrying a machete. But he was also 14, and every 14-year-old is someone’s baby; a kid who ought to be clattering in from school to raid the fridge and getting nagged to do their homework, worrying about their first kiss. His mother used a word we have heard a lot over the past few days to describe what had gone wrong for him. He had, she said, been groomed.

That adult criminal gangs are using increasingly........

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