A GRIEVING mother is planning to lay her son to rest in an emotional final farewell six years after he was shot and killed.

Leane Kerr will inter David Kerr’s ashes in the ground in a coffin she created and decorated herself after eventually managing to save £8,000 to cover the costs.

David, of Sherwood Road, South Harrow, was 22 when he was gunned down outside Alfred Nunn House, in Chadwick Road, Harlesden, in October 2006.

He managed to stagger into the street clutching his chest before dying in a pool of blood on the pavement.

Ashley George, then a 23-year-old cannabis dealer who lived in the block, was given a life sentence with a minimum tariff of 27 years for murdering the trainee carpenter and talented poet, at Southwark Crown Court in May 2008, as reported by the Observer at the time.

Ms Kerr, formerly of Harrow and now living in South Wales, said: “People thought that my son had been buried, but he wasn’t. I want his friends – I think he still has friends in Harrow – to understand they can feel rest assured that he will have a good send off. I set up a Facebook page to contact everyone that knew him in Harrow so they could give him a final farewell at the end of May.

“We are going to have a quiet family service at the family home and then go to the cemetery. I’m doing it because I know he would have done the same for me.”

Ms Kerr said a fundraiser for a funeral was held the month after her son’s death but the proceeds never reached her, so she had to save her benefits to pay for a cremation, attended by up to 400 mourners at Breakspear Crematorium, in Ruislip.

It was, however, not satisfactory for the mother-of-three and she has spent the time since putting money aside for a proper burial of his urn, including £5,000 for a headstone that is being crafted by David’s younger half-brother Lee, a stonemason, £600 for the grave and nearly £1,000 for the coffin and decorations.

The white and gold-trimmed coffin is heart-shaped and the lid bears the words ‘David will always live in the center of my heart’.

Ms Kerr said: “I don’t know so much that it’s closure for us but David had such a big heart and he was such a big part of our lives.

“It’s like a wound that has been left so big and so open that I don’t think it could ever be closed. The loss never stops being horrific. I think about David every single day and I didn’t think it was possible to cry every single day for six years – but it is.”

Eight friends of David’s, who was a popular regular at The Star pub, in Northolt Road, South Harrow, got tattoos bearing his name, his year of birth and the year he was murdered.