Twenty-seven-year-old Andre Jan Aylward was a well-liked young man who ran a pet shop in Streatham, a district in Greater London. Jan, as he was known to family and friends, was keenly interested in cars and car stereo equipment, and took great pleasure in working on his distinctive, lowered, black 5-Series BMW, which had an expensive sound system and darkly tinted windows.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 12th, 2001, Jan was driving his beloved automobile home after spending some time at a friend’s house. Witnesses later reported seeing his car stopped at a traffic light alongside another BMW, a gray one, at approximately one-twenty a.m.
Shortly afterward, six shots were fired into Jan’s vehicle, and the car collided with some parked cars before coming to rest in a nearby garden, only a few yards from Jan’s home. When police arrived, they discovered Jan Aylward had been shot six times in the head and neck with a handgun through the driver’s side window. He was rushed to the hospital, but succumbed to his injuries only two hours later.
Because of the witness descriptions of the gray BMW seen at the traffic light only minutes before shots were fired, authorities immediately focused on the driver of this vehicle as a suspect in the murder. Further testimony seemed to confirm that the same car had been spotted filling up at a BP gas station not long before the attack.
A thorough delve into Jan Aylward’s background yielded no apparent involvement in illegal activities that might have given someone motive to kill him, so investigators began exploring the possibility that Jan had either been murdered following an incident of road rage, or had been targeted due to mistaken identity. One theory was that, since Jan’s vehicle had some trappings of similar vehicles driven by drug dealers and people involved in gang activity—such as tinted windows and lowered suspension—then it’s possible that the killer might have erroneously believed he was a rival gang member.
Interestingly, in 2006, an investigative reporter named Richard Porritt came forward and told the media that he had been working with an undercover police officer since the murder had occurred, and that it was almost certain that the same gun used to kill Jan Aylward had also been used to murder twenty-six-year-old Steven McCalla only two days before, on May 10th. Steven McCalla was driving with his girlfriend in Brixton, South London, when a red Fiat Punto pulled up behind his vehicle and flashed the headlights, after which the driver fired five shots into Steven’s car, killing him and wounding his girlfriend. The Fiat reportedly contained three unidentified men.
It is speculated that both victims, while evidently not involved in gang activity themselves, might have inadvertently become caught in the crossfire of gang warfare, though the possibility that both were killed as a result of separate road rage incidents has not been ruled out.
Crime Immemorial 