Olivia Pratt-Korbel's gunman 'rode around estate on his bike' days after murder
Olivia Pratt-Korbel’s neighbours claimed that the gunman who shot her dead was riding around the estate on his bike, days after the murder.
Thomas Cashman was eventually caught, charged and convicted for killing the nine-year-old schoolgirl in her own home after a lengthy police effort. But what happened a year ago today, on August 22, 2022, still haunts the Liverpool locals who were neighbours to little Olivia and her mum Cheryl Korbel.
They recalled the horrific night in question, hearing the four gunshots and the screams of the mum, and its aftermath, where Cashman’s name quickly began circulating in the community.
Olivia Pratt-Korbel
The youngster had only come downstairs in the family home after being scared by the gunshots outside, only to be shot herself by Cashman (PA)Speaking to the Liverpool Echo, one mum said: “I know someone who went to school with him [Cashman], he was not a nice person then. You would always see him riding around here on his bike. Everyone knew what he was about, he was a drug dealer and a bully. Put it this way, when I heard it was him I was not surprised.”
The woman described attending a community meeting with Merseyside Police in the weeks after Olivia’s shooting. By that point, Cashman had been arrested but detectives were forced to release him on bail due to lack of evidence. The mum said: “People were saying, his name is everywhere, people are giving it in every day, but he’s riding around here on bikes. Obviously the police couldn’t talk about much with us, they just had to say they were working on it.”
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On top of that, the top cops who eventually caught Cashman admitted they thought he made himself visible around the area “on the day of the Queen’s funeral” to intimidate any potential witnesses. Whilst some neighbours are able to discuss what happened, for others, the memory is too raw. One man speaking on his doorstep, said: “I saw the whole thing. I don’t like talking about it.”
Olivia and her mum CherylOthers use words like "devastating", "heartbreaking" and "horrendous". Again and again locals described what happened inside one of those semi-detached houses on August 22, 2022, as a nightmare.
Shortly before 10pm, just after a football match between Liverpool and Manchester United ended, Olivia Pratt-Korbel was where she was entitled to feel safest of all - in her bed at the home she shared with her mum, Cheryl Korbel, sister Chloe and brother Ryan. Outside, 33-year-old drug-dealer Thomas Cashman was lying in wait with two guns to ambush fellow criminal Joseph Nee, over some murky underworld spat that had nothing to do with the Korbel family.
As heard during the harrowing four week trial at Manchester Crown Court in March, Nee tried to escape by forcing his way into the Korbel home. Cashman, undeterred by the obvious risk of hitting innocent bystanders, shot blindly through the front door, with a .38 calibre revolver, wounding Cheryl and hitting nine-year-old Olivia in the chest. The schoolgirl had been frightened by the loud bangs and gone to find her mum downstairs, who was wrestling with the door trying to keep Nee out.
Murderer Thomas Cashman
Neighbours recalled how they used to see the young schoolgirl riding up and down the street on her bicycle (PA)Following that harrowing night, the Korbel family, as you would expect, quickly left their house and moved away. But their former neighbours in the street remember everything. “I used to see her riding her bike up and down the road. She had loads of spirit, she wasn’t soft, Olivia”, recalls one mum.
Casting her mind back a year, she said: “We were just in my front room watching TV when we heard the bangs. At first I thought it was fireworks. I heard the first, then the second, then the third, and then after the fourth I heard Cheryl screaming.”
The mum said the first police car arrived quickly, within minutes of the shots being fired. "The police came out then carrying Olivia. I said to my husband ‘it’s a kid, a kid has been shot’, he said ‘don’t be stupid it’s not’. I didn’t know it was Olivia then, because I couldn’t quite see what house it was. But the next day it came out I was right, and it was the little girl, and it was Cheryl who was injured. They are such a lovely family.
“I was absolutely heartbroken. My daughter suffers with anxiety, she was 10 at the time. We had to sit her down and had to explain to her what had happened. She was asking ‘why would people shoot a little girl?’. We tried to explain the best way we could.”
In the surreal days that followed, the family, whose home was within the police cordon, could not drive their car out of the street. The mum described looking out of her window to see a line of constables carrying out painstaking fingertip searches, looking for bullet casings and fragments.
A few yards away, the country’s media gathered at the edge of the cordon where mounds of flowers and cards built up. Another neighbour, who also heard the puzzling bangs outside her home as she sat to watch the 10 o’clock news, recalled the way local criminals tried to ensure nobody would speak to the police even before Olivia’s death.
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One woman, who again did not wish to be named, said in around February or March last year a white man on a bike, although she was unsure whether it was Cashman or any of his associates, noticed her home CCTV cameras and said: “I hope you won’t give that to the police. I said ‘do you think you can intimidate me?’”
Despite her bravado at the time, the woman said she would have been frightened to report criminal activity to the police before Olivia’s death. When she found out what had happened, however, her attitude shifted. She said: “When I heard it was a little girl, I just thought the police can have my CCTV, they can have whatever. Everyone around here was sobbing, even the children. Even my niece and nephew, they came to stay and they were so afraid to go out.”
Cashman, thanks in large part to a former lover who turned him in, was convicted of Olivia's murder and on April 3 was handed a life sentence, with a minimum term of 42 years in prison, by trial judge Mrs Justice Yip. One common thread from the residents of Kingsheath Avenue was the remaining sense of fear, despite an enormous amount of police activity.
The mum told the ECHO: “I’m more scared now than I was at the time. After it happened there were police here all the time, you didn’t mind going out. But they can’t stay forever, they’ve got other places to be. I still see drug dealing out here, round the shops. They will never get rid of it fully.”
The auntie who spoke of her niece and nephew also said gang activity is still a regular feature of the Dovecot area.
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