It is alleged that Stephen Ojerinola, 18, was dumped in a makeshift grave in the back garden of one of the attackers following the brutal attack in Kidbrooke, South East London. Jurors were told that William Regan and Lee Davies, who are accused of murder, then erected a flatpack shed on top of the teenager’s burial site.
The court also heard that after arranging the ‘undignified and unlawful burial’, Regan phoned the victim’s girlfriend to ask whether she had seen him. Ojerinola’s body was not uncovered until seven months after he disappeared during a police visit to Regan’s home. Regan and Davies, both 36, are said to have attacked Ojerinola at some point on April 11 or 12 last year but it was not until November 20 that police unearthed his remains.
His body – encased in concrete – was discovered by a trained sniffer dog following more than a day of excavation in Regan’s garden, said prosecutor Max Hill. He added: “He was several feet down. Buried, therefore, beneath the shed, gravel, a tarpaulin, wooden boards, mixed rubble, loose soil and then the concrete.
“As the team dug down, first his trainer shoe emerged from the earth and concrete.
“Then a body, curled into a foetal position. His arms were in fact around a ball of concrete, hardened after it had been poured inside his hooded top. “He had been placed in that grave to rot.
“The levels above him demonstrate the planning and effort put into concealing him and the callous disregard shown for this 18-year-old young man.
“There was even, in fact, a Twix wrapper, discarded in one of the levels of his unlawful grave – discarded perhaps by one of those who worked so hard to ensure Ojerinola would never be seen by anyone again,” the prosecutor added.
Ojerinola was lured to Regan’s home on the pretext of selling his attacker drugs, the court heard.
But instead, said Mr. Hill: “He found himself in the company of two men, both twice his age with a tendency to explode into violence and a predisposition to use weapons to inflict injury on others.”
