Kelvin Easton

Kelvin Easton was killed in the Boheme nightclub on Mile End Road, Bow, in March 2011.

A man was tried but acquitted.

He was found dead at the bottom of some stairs at the club at about 4.30am on Sunday 27 March 2011 having been stabbed in the heart. He was also said to have been attacked with a champagne bottle and beaten up.

The police questioned twelve men and arrested and charged one of them. They said that the man had been in a group of up to eight people that had attacked Kelvin Easton at the club and that he had stabbed Kelvin Easton four times after believing that Kelvin Easton had stabbed a friend of theirs several minutes earlier. The man that had allegedly been stabbed was a cousin of the man that was tried for Kelvin Easton's murder.

The Boheme nightclub had its license suspended after the murder when it was found that the CCTV hard drive covering the time of the murder had been stolen as well as other reasons. The license was suspended, it was said, for the club’s lack of security as well as noise complaints made by local Mile End residents, parking problems and fights outside its premises. The week before it had also been fined £6k for posting illegal posters across the Tower Hamlets area.

The court also heard that the man that was tried for Kelvin Easton‘s murder had had a grudge against Kelvin Easton since they were arrested together for being drunk and disorderly after a fight between themselves in the City of London on 11 January 2011. It was said that after they had been arrested the man that was tried for the murder was still sore with Kelvin Easton, a statement which was said to have been putting things rather mildly. The court heard that there was no indication that that animosity had healed by the time of the murder.

The man didn't give evidence in court but his lawyers said that he had not been part of the group that had attacked Kelvin Easton and he was acquitted. However, his girlfriend was convicted of perverting justice by lying to police after it was said that she had said that she didn't know where he was when he had disappeared after the murder even though it was later shown that she had spoken to him several times a day on the phone and even met up with him.

There had been about 500 people at the Boheme nightclub on the night. Witnesses said an argument had broken out between two men and a few punches were exchanged and that there was then a rush of about seven or eight men between 4.05am and 4.30am that pushed through the club chasing Kelvin Easton and brushing aside anyone in their way. Kelvin Easton then went to go down some stairs but stumbled and fell down. He had then been beaten up and stabbed with two knives.

The court heard that the man that was charged with the murder had been involved in the fight and that afterwards he had received a stab wound to his shoulder and that he had gone to the Whittington Hospital in Archway for treatment using a false name. It was thought that he had been stabbed accidently. However, it was heard that shortly after treatment he had walked out of the hospital in the middle of the night in his hospital gown with a cannula still in his arm which he took out outside of the hospital. It was then said that he had gone on the run for eight months. He was later arrested at a relative’s house in West Hanney, Oxfordshire.

In 2013 it was reported that the police had been keeping an eye on Mark Duggan in the belief that he had been planning a tit-for-tat murder in revenge for the murder of Kelvin Easton who had been his cousin. However, Mark Duggan was shot dead by the police during their tracking operation on him which caused rioting across England.

Kelvin Easton had lived in Gospatrick Road, Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, north London and had been a rapper using the name Smegz. He was also a father of two children.