Former Eastenders star teams with London born Bollywood music producer to support a mother desperate for justice.
A child’s unexplained death… a mother’s worst nightmare.
One dark night in October 1997, young 20-year-old, Brunel University computer science student, Ricky Reel failed to return home after a night out with friends in Kingston Upon Thames. A week later his body was found in the River Thames. But despite initial assumptions made by the police, this was not a simple accident, and Ricky’s mother has spent the past 23 years battling against the system to find the truth about what really happened to her son on that fateful October night.
Now, 23 years on, former Eastenders and Bend It Like Beckham star, Ameet Chana has teamed up with west London born Bollywood music producer Rishi Rich and singer-songwriter Kiranee to pick up the baton and remind the world, through music, about the injustice faced by the family of Ricky Reel.
When Ricky uncharacteristically failed to return home his family went to the local police, but they were turned away and sent to another police station closer to their home. Again, the Reel family were turned away, passed between different stations and the officers joked that Ricky had probably run away in order to avoid an arranged marriage and that maybe he was gay. They even implied that Sukhdev Reel, his own mother, was involved in his disappearance! The family is clear that these assumptions were based on their race.
Neither police station took the investigation seriously and Sukhdev Reel remembers: “We were begging on our knees asking them to find Ricky. We were out in groups looking for our son. We were putting up posters, collecting evidence like CCTV and handing it to police."
But a week later, Ricky's body was found in the River Thames. On the night in question, two youths were witnessed shouting “P*k*s go home” before they attacked Ricky and his friends.
The Police initially endeavoured to persuade the family that Ricky must have fallen into the river whilst he was urinating and told the family no further investigation was needed. But Ricky's family have always believed that he was murdered, stating that his phobia of open water would have never led him to urinate near a river. The family themselves along with campaigners obtained a wealth of evidence, including commissioning their own independent post mortem which showed that this was not an accident. Additionally, his own friends who accompanied him that night described being racially attacked.
No forensic examination was undertaken of the scene where Ricky's body was recovered nor of his clothes which were returned to the family, resulting in vital evidence being lost. This clearly shows the police’s negligence and closed mind.
The Reel family’s commissioned post-mortem indicated that Ricky had fallen into the River Thames backwards, his shirt was torn and Ricky also had blunt-impact bruising on his back. An external investigation into the conduct of the police had found that there were 'weaknesses and flaws' in the original investigation, that vital CCTV had been destroyed without being viewed and statements had not been taken by the police in time. Instead of looking for the suspects responsible for Ricky’s death, the police spied on the Reel family, wrongly worried that Sukhdev was arranging violent and political protests.
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