Mother Valentina Locci at Leo’s grave in Islington Cemetery in East Finchley

FIVE men have been jailed for life after murdering two people in Archway – but the mother of 15-year-old victim Leonardo Reid has said she is the one with the life sentence.

Talking to the Tribune after the killers’ ­sentencing last week, Leo’s mother Valentina Locci paid tribute to her “smart, witty, cheeky” son and said she thinks parenting lies at the root of youth violence.

In July, a jury found five men from Islington guilty of murdering Leo and 23-year-old Klevi Shekaj on June 29 2023.

The men – Lorik Lupqi, 22, Abel Chunda, 29, Jason Furtado, 28, Eden Clark, 31, and Xavier Poponne, 22 – were also convicted for the attempted murder of another man.

Jurors wore black as they delivered their verdict, in an unusual mark of respect to the victims’ families.

During the 15-week trial, the defendants “smirked”, fought each other and verbally abused judge Anjua Dhir KC.

At one point the trial had to be halted when Lupqi attacked Chunda, spraying the dock with blood.

When Judge Dhir handed down his sentence, Lupqi said: “Suck your mum… When I come out I’m going to kill you.”

Ms Locci told the Tribune: “They didn’t have a care in the world when they were sitting there. The constant disrespect for the courtroom, the judge, for us sitting there as the victims’ parents.

“There was no remorse, there was nothing from them. They’re empty souls. They are lost, empty, broken people, if they can glorify doing what they did to my little boy.

“They got life, but I’m the one who’s got the life sentence. They get to get visits, I get to visit my son in a cemetery.”

The jury had heard how victims Leo and Klevi were among a crowd of locals watching a drill video being filmed on the Elthorne estate in June 2023.

Seeing the event from his window, Lupqi – whose 39-year minimum prison sentence is the longest of the group – thought there were gang opponents among them, and organised with Furtado for Chunda, Clark and Poppone to take a taxi from Essex Road to Elthorne to carry out an attack.

The video filming was over when they arrived with machetes and balaclavas, but many local teenagers were still in the area enjoying the warm weather.

Neither Leo nor Klevi had anything to do with the five men or postcode gang violence.

During the trial, prosecutors showed 50 short phone calls between the five men in the two hours before the murders and highlighted lyrics written by Poppone that glorified the killing.

Poppone also changed his name on social media from “X” to “X3” – a reference to the number of people he had stabbed.

Ms Locci and Klevi’s mother, Valbona Shekaj, spoke during the sentencing at the Old Bailey about the impact of losing their sons.

Ms Shekaj said: “No punishment can bring my son back or fill the void his absence has created in my life. But a just sentence may perhaps serve as a deterrent to others, and prevent them from inflicting this pain on another family.

“Klevi’s final words to me echoed with a promise; he would be home in five minutes – instead, I was met at my door by officers, delivering news that forever altered the trajectory of my life. No mother should have to endure the agony of burying her own child, particularly due to such senseless violence.”

Victim: Leonardo Reid

Ms Locci – who re-read her court statement to the Tribune in the cemetery where her son is buried – paid tribute to her “beautiful, charming, intelligent” boy.

She said: “I have had people ask me if justice and closure had been reached. But what does closure mean for me? I am thankful that some form of justice has been served for my son, so he can rest in peace knowing that the people that murdered him are now in prison.”

She added: “The scars, the horror, that will never go away. There will never be closure for me or my family. Time does not heal now, or for the rest of our lives.”

Leo was a “character”, Ms Locci told the Tribune, adding: “He was very quiet and introverted if he didn’t know you, but if you knew him he’d have you in fits.

“He had to warm to you, he had to study you, that’s just how he was. But boy, those one-liners. Sometimes he put me in my place with one line.”

As a teenager, Leo dutifully picked up his younger sisters – now aged 8 and 9 – from school when his mum was working, would never be caught out of the house in anything but his best clothes, and dreamed of one day owning his favourite car, a Rolls Royce Phantom.

“He was very intelli­gent, very sharp, and he had determination,” Ms Locci added, citing Leo’s commitment to get fit via daily workout videos in their garden, or his independent decision to convert to Islam in a ceremony at Finsbury Park Mosque just months before he was killed.

For Ms Locci, a single mother who works as a behavioural specialist in schools, parenting is at the root of violence between young people.

She said: “Don’t have kids if you can’t control them, if you haven’t got the parenting bones. You’ve got to have some character about you to raise children in this day and age, unless you are middle class and you have the capability of giving them the soft life and wrapping them in cotton wool.

“It’s not that they have to be scared of you, but they have to respect you. You can have a friendship, but they have to know first that you are their parent. If you have a plant and you don’t water it, what happens? If you have a tree and you don’t straighten it from the root, it’s going to go wobbly. That’s what your job is.”

Ms Locci also told how the media has a responsibility not to perpetuate assumptions about the “race, colour, or age” of people committing crimes.

She said: “People ask me, ‘what were they?’ As in, what colour? Because they associate crime to a colour, the majority of the time they say black on black.

“But look at the five individuals that killed my son. Where do you see a colour? They were men. Actually, I say they were dickheads. Five of them don’t make one brain. I don’t care what colour they are. Crime is down to the individual. It’s not ‘black on black’, let’s not be stupid.”

Even during the trial, Ms Locci added, she felt the media was waiting for something to come up about Leo being involved in gangs himself.

“Because I’m a single mum and I live where I live,” she said.

“But my kids don’t rep any postcode, they have no problem with anybody. You can’t put me anywhere that I don’t want to be. I am not a statistic.”

Leo was born on November 19, 2007. He should be turning 18 this year, “opening his presents, doing my head in from six months before about what he wants,” his mother said.

“I’d probably be like, ‘Oh my god you’re getting on my nerves with this birthday’.

“These are the things that I now miss. I go through videos in the middle of the night because I want to listen to his voice, look at his smile, because I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want to forget his voice, what he sounded like.

“But I have to carry on going. I’m the captain of the ship. I can’t break down because I’ve got three other human beings that I’ve created that look up to me. I put a shield up, because it’s hard. Ultimately, it’s something that I have to live with inside. This was written for me. I don’t know why, but it was.”