True Crime Stories: The unsolved murder of Jonathan Matondo
  • last year
How the murder of 16-year-old Jonathan Matondo - gunned down in a city park - shocked Sheffield.

Jonathan Matondo came to Sheffield as a young boy for a better life – to escape a civil war in his home country.

But ironically, just a few years later, the youngster from the Democratic Republic of Congo was killed in what is believed to have been a feud between two rival postcode gangs. He was assassinated in what should have been his safe haven: a city hailed as one of the safest in the country.

Jonathan had said goodbye to his mum on that fateful night when she went to church, and she thought her beloved son was meeting up with a group of friends.

But despite the teenager’s family believing that he had wanted to become a church preacher, he was leading a secret life they knew nothing about. He was a gang member and was known to have carried a gun and a blade. He was known as Venemous.

Although nobody is behind bars for Jonathan’s murder, detectives revealed what they believed happened to him when they charged a suspect soon after the killing and he was prosecuted.

He stood trial twice, with the jury unable to reach a verdict after the first trial and finding him not guilty after a second.
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