Murder investigation launched after woman fatally assaulted
The Metropolitan Police said officers were called to Chadwell Heath, east London, just after 5.30am on Saturday after reports of an assault.
Paramedics also attended but the woman was pronounced dead at the scene, the force said.
The woman has not yet been formally identified, police said, but officers believe she was in her twenties.
Her family have been informed and are being supported by family liaison officers, the force added.
No one has yet been arrested in connection with the incident.
Detective Superintendent Brian Hobbs said: 'Our thoughts today are with the victim's family and friends in light of this truly tragic event.
'Local residents will see an increased number of officers in and around the area while our investigative work is carried out.
'I want to thank residents for their patience while this continues. I would ask anyone who was in the area of Romford, who may have seen or heard anything suspicious, to come forward to us.'
Anyone with any information about the incident is asked to contact police via 101 quoting 1625/16Aug, or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

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CBS News
5 minutes ago
- CBS News
Son accused of trying to burn Sacramento County home down with parents inside after argument
A man was arrested after he tried to burn a house down with his parents inside on Saturday evening, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office said. Deputies responded to the 3600 block of 45th Avenue around 5 p.m. for a welfare check. The sheriff's office said they learned from family members that 37-year-old Smoekitt Say got into an argument with his 80-year-old father. Deputies said Say then tried to burn the house down with his parents inside. Family members extinguished the fire before emergency personnel arrived. But Say took off from the scene and was later located nearby by deputies, the sheriff's office. He was arrested and booked into jail, where deputies said he's ineligible for bail.


New York Times
5 minutes ago
- New York Times
Ronnie Stam, Dutch footballers and the criminal underworld: ‘Once you're in, you never get out'
From the second floor of Breda's courthouse, it was possible to make out the floodlights of the football stadium where, in happier times, Ronnie Stam had been a local celebrity. The shamed 41-year-old was about to be added to the list of footballers, or ex-footballers, who had been imprisoned for being enticed into the Dutch criminal underworld. And that list is getting bigger. Advertisement 'It's painful for Dutch football,' Evgenii Levchenko, chairman of the Dutch professional footballers association (VVCS), tells The Athletic. 'It's not good for Dutch football and it's not good for the Dutch image. And it's very painful when you see so many big, talented players who don't understand they are killing the image of our football.' Stam won the Dutch league championship with Twente in 2010 and was part of Wigan Athletic's squad the following year, albeit injured, when they beat Manchester City to win the FA Cup in one of the biggest shocks in the history of English football. On Tuesday, however, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for his part in an international drug-smuggling plot — the latest case to explain why Levchenko and his colleagues are warning the nation's footballers their industry 'is not only a magnet for the rich and beautiful, but also for criminals'. In June, the former Ajax winger Quincy Promes was extradited to the Netherlands in another high-profile case that has left Dutch football questioning itself. Promes, who earned 50 caps for the Netherlands, was sentenced to six years in prison in February last year for trafficking 1,363 kilograms (3,005lb) of cocaine with a street value estimated at £65million ($82m). Since then, he had been living as a fugitive, first in Russia and then Dubai. Then there is the story of David Mendes da Silva, another former Netherlands international, who was jailed for seven years in 2022 for helping to smuggle two consignments of cocaine, weighing 74kg and 105kg, into the country. The Da Silva case particularly hurt Levchenko, given that they had once been team-mates at Sparta Rotterdam. 'I was talking to David a month before he was caught. I asked: 'What are you doing now, David?'. He said: 'Oh, nothing much — something here, something there'. We agreed we would have to get together. Everything, to me, seemed very normal. But, in the end, these guys all did something very stupid.' Advertisement Da Silva, whose career also included spells at Ajax, NAC Breda and AZ, was also convicted of bribing a shipping clerk with a €100,000 (£90,000; $120,000) payment. 'I let certain people get too close,' he admitted in court. If that was the full extent of the issue — three multi-million-pound drug busts and three high-profile footballers in prison — it would still be shocking. Yet the Dutch authorities openly accept there have been numerous other cases whereby past and present players have hooked up with serious criminals, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years. Those players, in turn, have become involved in, or on the edges of, drug, money-laundering and match-fixing plots. And sometimes worse: weapons, shootings and death. 'The difficulty we have is that some players are so close to the criminals,' says Levchenko, VVCS chairman since 2019. 'They think they are friends. And that is the biggest mistake they can make. 'We hear it so often: 'Yeah, but he's my friend, I've known him all my life'. And I say: 'If he were your real friend, he would never transport drugs in your car. Or ask you to carry €1million of watches to different countries'. Because those are things that have happened. 'It can start with something so simple. 'Can I borrow your car? Can you look after these watches? Can you get a shirt signed for me? Fancy coming to my birthday party where I will introduce you to the other criminals?'. That is the start. And once you're in, you never get out.' Are organised criminals deliberately targeting young, impressionable footballers? Arno van Leeuwen, a retired Amsterdam detective, answered that question during an interview last year with BN DeStem, the Breda-based newspaper, in which he discussed his own experiences of liaising with Ajax and the Dutch football association (KNVB) to warn players of the dangers. Advertisement Van Leeuwen explained how, in many cases, the footballers and criminals had grown up in the same areas. He started to notice the pattern more clearly in 2015 when an Amsterdam criminal known as 'Boeloeloe' was warned by the police that his life was in danger. Boeloeloe left the police station in a leased Mercedes. When Van Leeuwen's colleagues checked the number plate, they discovered it belonged to an Ajax youth player. 'So I thought, 'Let's check all those other Ajax lease cars through the system',' said Van Leeuwen. 'And what did I know? They were often lent to criminals.' Further inquiries revealed that one of the cars had been the target of gunfire after a footballer lent it to a friend. A hail of bullets went through the rear window and lodged in the driver's seat. It was a shocking scene — so shocking that the police still use the photos in their presentations to clubs and KNVB officials. Another of the Ajax player's cars was being driven around by the son of Gwenette Martha, a career criminal who was gunned down in 2014 and left with 80 bullets in his body. And Boeloeloe? He, too, was shot dead in a separate incident. Promes signed for Ajax in 2019 and Van Leeuwen recalled the footballer being seen with well-known criminals. 'We told him: 'Those are guys who could be targets for assassinations. And you're driving around with them. If they come under fire, you're sitting next to them in the car'.' According to a file from the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, Promes was also linked to Piet Wortel, a notorious figure in the Dutch underworld. Wortel was suspected of being involved in a litany of serious crimes, including drug trafficking and the 2019 murder of ex-footballer Kelvin Maynard, a Suriname-born right-back who was shot multiple times in his car in Amsterdam-Zuidoost. Advertisement Maynard, whose career included two seasons with Burton Albion in England's lower divisions, was gunned down by two masked assailants on a moped. His assassination was allegedly ordered in revenge for the theft of 400kg of cocaine, and shortly after, the 32-year-old had posted a photograph on social media showing him holding a huge wad of €50 notes. Wortel, who is serving a three-year prison term for money laundering, denies any involvement. Promes has lodged an appeal against his conviction and is fighting an additional 18-month sentence, imposed in 2023, for stabbing his cousin. The difficulty for the police, the clubs, the players association and other Dutch authorities is that there is a culture in modern-day football for many players flaunting their wealth. In that world, being rich is seen as the best way to get street cred. And, in the process, they romanticise a lifestyle of fast cars, expensive jewellery and attractive women. Levchenko says he has personally asked elite footballers from the Eredivisie, Dutch football's top flight, to reconsider what they put on social media. But do they listen? One leading international, he says, recently posted a picture of himself wearing a €200,000 watch. 'All the stars love to show off their different way of life: the cars, the beautiful women, the watches. What they don't seem to understand is that the younger players are watching them. It's wrong of the big stars. But they want to show off.' Another case relates to Romeo Castelen, a former Feyenoord and ADO Den Haag footballer who was arrested at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport in 2019 on suspicion of laundering €2.2million. Castelen, who made 10 appearances for the Dutch national team, had €139,000 in his pocket but claimed the money was earned through football, the watch trade and casino wins. 'In the football world,' his lawyer, Evelien de Witte, told a preliminary court hearing in Zwolle last year, 'it is considered cool to show off a wad of cash in the locker room.' Castelen, 42, denies any wrongdoing. On other occasions, high-profile footballers have been seen on nights out with known criminals, often in VIP sections of bars. One infamous occasion goes back to 2013 when the waterside river party at Amsterdam's Scheepvaartmuseum turned into a shootout between rival gangs, leaving one man dead. One Netherlands international, according to the police, allowed his Porsche to be used by criminals and the car ended up riddled with bullet holes. Another issue is the frequency with which the players' properties have been used for illegal purposes. Advertisement Reports in the Dutch media have alleged that Robin van Ouwerkerk, a feared criminal who gained international notoriety for allegedly creating 'torture containers' in Brabant, was the subject of an assassination plot while living in an apartment rented out by Karim Rekik, the former PSV youth-team player. Marco Ebben, a convicted drugs kingpin who was shot dead in Mexico this year, was previously reported to have been hiding in the penthouse of former Feyenoord player Terence Kongolo (now at NAC Breda). Guns were found in a house rented by Jetro Willems, then a Groningen player, in the town of Barendrecht in 2023. Willems, formerly of Newcastle United and now at NEC Nijmegen, said he was shocked by the discovery and it is important to make clear he was not treated as a suspect. Nor was Rekik, a former Manchester City player, or Kongolo, who played for Huddersfield Town and Fulham in the Premier League. These stories are alarming, nonetheless, given the reputations of the criminals involved. The police advice is: if you are a footballer moving to a new city or country, rent out your property through a reputable estate agent — not via friends, or friends of friends. 'We once had a footballer who had transferred abroad,' Bob Schagen, another highly experienced Amsterdam detective, told the Het Parool newspaper in 2023. 'He had rented out his house through acquaintances. That house became a criminal hotbed. Someone else lived there who was later shot dead. In the end, that footballer himself was clearing out a cannabis plantation. You can become infected for life through criminal contacts.' In Stam's case, the court in Breda was told he had established himself as one of the 'big boys' of the criminal underworld since retiring from playing in 2016. He was arrested after the police intercepted six months of messages on encrypted phones — a favoured choice of communication for organised criminals — that showed him plotting to smuggle cocaine and MDMA with a street value running into millions of pounds. Advertisement Stam, who was raised in Breda and had two spells at the city's biggest football club, admitted that he had colluded with his accomplices, including his brother, Rudi, to smuggle 20kg of cocaine from Brazil to Germany. The payment, he said, was 'an amount worth one kilo.' But he insisted that was his only involvement. He also alleged that gangland figures had turned up at a PSV youth-team fixture where his eldest son was playing. 'They threatened me on the sidelines at my son's game,' Stam told the court. 'A grenade was thrown at my house.' The reaction can largely be summed up by Ronald Waterreus, the former Netherlands goalkeeper, in a column for De Limburger newspaper, where he expressed 'pure disgust' for Stam and was heavily critical of Promes, too. Promes, Waterreus noted, had described his time in a Dubai prison as 'hell on earth'. Stam also complained about his circumstances, including the impact on his family, and did not turn up for his sentencing because 'those rides in the van from prison to court are hell'. 'Disbelief, sadness, anger,' Waterreus wrote. 'But perhaps most of all: anger. And that is mainly due to the 'victim' role in which these two gentlemen manoeuvre themselves. Wanting to be so tough as to deal in large quantities of drugs, with all the life-threatening consequences for society. Then acting like a whining toddler when you get the punishment that you asked for.' Waterreus urged the courts to impose the 'severest possible' punishment. And that anger is exacerbated because, reputation-wise, these cases are painting a picture of Dutch football that the relevant people see as unwanted and unfair. Levchenko, a former Ukraine international, has lived in the Netherlands since the age of 18 and played for six of their professional teams. Now 47, he is part of regular meetings with the clubs and players, of all ages, warning them not to follow the lead of Stam and all the others. Advertisement 'It's not only the Netherlands,' says Levchenko. 'I have seen something similar in Bulgaria, in Ukraine and Russia. But this is a big, painful story for Dutch football because the whole world is watching the Netherlands. 'We are visiting the clubs, talking to the players, their mothers and their fathers, and what we are finding is that the young generation don't think too much about the future. They just think about the moment: 'OK, if I do this (crime), I can make a lot of money'. 'That is really not wise. We tell them: 'Guys, one wrong move and your career is over. Don't be stupid — don't just think it's easy money. The chance of you being caught is so big'.' Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle


New York Times
5 minutes ago
- New York Times
One Premier League CEO's bid to save England's ‘lost boys' from ‘toxic online ideas'
Paul Barber is the chief executive of Brighton & Hove Albion, a Premier League club whose accounts show a profit of nearly £200million over the past two seasons. It's not all about money, of course, but things are very healthy: Barber has been at the club since 2012 after previously working for the Vancouver Whitecaps, Tottenham Hotspur and the Football Association and, in April last year, Brighton's owner Tony Bloom tied him down for a further six years with a contract until 2030. Advertisement In his childhood years, however, Barber says things threatened to spiral after his parents split up when he was 13. 'I went from being a kid in the top quarter of the class to being disengaged, disinterested, not turning up for lessons, playing truant, getting into scraps (fights), and losing my sense of direction and purpose,' he tells The Athletic. 'That was partly because my dad left home and I didn't have that real male role model in my life any more. 'My mum was working three jobs to make sure there was food on the table and clothes on the backs of myself, my younger brother, and sister. I shut myself off from pretty much everyone and everything. It was such a short period from being a kid who was well balanced and engaged in every sport to being completely disengaged from everything and everyone.' It is this experience that led Barber, in his role as non-executive chair of the charity Football Beyond Borders, to spearhead a new group, the 'Lost Boys Taskforce'. It wants the UK government to help 'save a generation of boys from toxic online ideas by providing trusted adults'. It follows the national discussion that gripped the UK in 2024 when Netflix released Adolescence, a four-part drama delving into the 'manosphere', and followed a family whose lives are torn apart when a 13-year-old schoolboy is arrested for killing a female classmate. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer met the creators of the show and young people to take in their views on how young men can be supported. Barber, in a press release, warned: 'At a time when toxic influencers like Andrew Tate are filling the void for so many boys, it's clear that too many young men feel isolated and directionless. That's a ticking time-bomb, not just for them, but for generations that follow.' The search for direction is taking young men to dark corners of the internet — in 2023, for example, the third-most Googled person in the world was Tate, a self-proclaimed sexist who has described women as 'intrinsically lazy' and said there was 'no such thing as an independent female'. Advertisement The taskforce features representation from politics, business, sport and education — including English Football Association CEO Mark Bullingham, England men's national football team assistant manager Anthony Barry, actor and documentary-maker Ross Kemp, Iron Man triathlete John McAvoy and England basketball player Kofi Josephs — and is asking the government to fund training for 10,000 'trusted adults' in education and sport settings. The group says 630,000 young people in England do not have a 'trusted adult', by which it means a person outside their family who they feel safe to confide in. As Barber puts it: 'There's a need for such people that sit alongside parents… they need to be able to listen without making a judgement, to understand what's going on in that young person's life. 'The most important thing with a trusted adult is being there consistently and when you are there, being present. Unless you listen, unless you understand, unless you relate to that challenge that they're facing, you can't help them.' Dr Alex Blower, author of the book Lost Boys: How Education is Failing Young Working-Class Men, has also founded Boys' Impact, a network seeking to address the gap in education outcomes for young men. He says there was a noticeable spike in concerning conversations and incidents following the pandemic, which took children out of schools, increasing online dependency and limiting social interactions. This year, the Centre for Social Justice published a report entitled Lost Boys: State of the Nation. Citing the UK Office for National Statistics, it said 15.1 per cent of men aged 16-24 between July and September 2024 were not in education, employment or training. This represented 550,000 individuals, an increase of 150,000 since before Covid-19. The report also described Britain as 'suffering a pandemic of fatherlessness', saying that 2.5 million children — one in five of all dependent children — had no father figure in the home. Advertisement In Barber's case, matters never became so extreme. His life was placed back on track as a teenager, but it took an intervention by a teacher and a football coach. 'Those guys spotted this change, they realised something was up,' he says. 'I hadn't told anyone my parents had split. No one knew. No one understood. But these teachers knew me well enough to say: 'Hang on. Something happened there. We need to get to the bottom of it'. Rather than punish me, they said: 'Let's understand what the hell is going on?'. 'I was one example back in 1980, because now there are 630,000 versions of me, and rather than playing truant and maybe getting into one or two scraps, some of these kids are in gangs, they're carrying knives, they're getting murdered, they're committing murder.' While generalisations can be dangerous, trends are visible. That Centre for Social Justice report also detailed that 76 per cent of children in custody, for example, said they had an absent father. In Britain, one in four boys aged 10 to 11 is obese, while teenage boys are grappling with body-image concerns. The impact of online harm is also laid out: the average age at which a child first sees online porn is 13, while one in 10 see it as young as nine years old. A National Centre for Gaming Disorders was established in 2020, and 90 per cent of its users in 2023 were male. Dr Blower explains that young people are reeled into the 'manosphere' by browsing for subject areas that may ordinarily be deemed positive, such as wellness, fitness, motivation, sports or gaming. Bad actors, he explains, 'use positive things as a hook to begin to engage young individuals in content aligned with misogynistic views'. He makes the point that sport can offer young people a focus, and trusted adults from within sport can often be more relatable than a teacher. Yet it also seems justified to ask whether men's professional sport is doing everything it can to address attitudes towards women and perceptions of masculinity. Last month, for example, former Mexico striker Javier Hernandez apologised after releasing a video online which claimed 'women are failing' and 'eradicating masculinity'. While Barber cannot be expected to answer for the global game, he can speak more generally on football's approach towards creating more mindful men. Advertisement 'It's a really fair point,' he says. 'Clubs in the Premier League and the Championship are increasingly recognising they have a role to play in education. 'We (Brighton) bring in outside organisations to help educate players, for example, on how to conduct themselves in a situation in a nightclub where there's an attractive girl that they are talking to; how do you conduct yourself, what's appropriate, what's not appropriate? The trouble is, unless you've been told or educated by your parents or an elder sibling, then you don't know what you don't know. 'For a long time, there's been this assumption that every young person who goes out into the adult world knows how to behave. It's a naive assumption, because there are a lot of things you have to learn about being an adult. We have to bridge the gap. 'A lot of Premier League clubs, ours included, spend more money on player-care departments. We need to help young men and women develop as humans and provide them with life skills. We definitely haven't got all the answers. We haven't got everything right. We understand we've got a role to play.' A UK government spokesperson told The Athletic the state is investing £88million ($119m) 'in opportunities for boys in a major expansion of youth services and real-world opportunities to reconnect young people with the world around them'. Barber says the task force is seeking £5million in funding over a three-year period to train 10,000 trusted adults, which could come from a combination of private and public money. It also requires support from the Department of Education so that trained personnel, who will be subject to safeguarding checks, can access the system and support children. 'This isn't something where the government is going to flip a switch and everything's going to change,' says Barber, 'but someone has to start something if we're going to see change. Advertisement 'If you go back to Adolescence, which was a drama, you look at a stable family; husband and wife, a sister, a young lad. They think they have a good kid doing well at school and sociable at home, but they did not realise he was lurking in dark corners on the internet. 'It could be anyone's 13- or 14-year-old who goes down that path. A trusted adult may be able to stop it.' Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle