Today marks fifteen years since the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by UK police at Stockwell station in London. As they have done so often through the years, the family and friends of Jean Charles gathered outside the station, lit a candle, and laid flowers inside five-litre plastic water bottles cut open as makeshift vases. Above the flowers is a new mural, which replaced the impromptu community shrine that sprung-up here in the years immediately after the killing. Beneath John Charles’ smiling face, written in tiles, is the one word it is most important remains attached to him: Innocent.

It is thanks to the simple yet powerful efforts of the family that the memory of Jean Charles can be preserved. Wearing “Justice for Jean” t-shirts, the number 27 on the reverse to mark the years of his life, a few members of the Stockwell community that were so shaken by the police killing also stood in silent memorial at 10:10am, the time that he was shot. Other passers-by stooped to lay their own flowers at the scene. Waiting at traffic lights, a van driver sounded his horn and, looking towards the group through the open window of his vehicle, placed his hands quickly together in prayer.

After the small ceremony, a cousin of Jean Charles – a young girl then, and now a mother with her child beside her – spoke of how she still has to stop herself thinking about how it might have been different. What if he had he left the house later that day, or earlier. Police officers watching the address where de Menezes lived, in the weeks after the July 7th terrorist attacks, had began tailing Jean Charles in a case of mistaken identity that hinged, they said, on the electrician’s “Mongolian eyes.”

If uncertainty underpinned the pursuit, it was all gone come the moment of execution, and though there is a reluctance to be so graphic, it still seems relevant that the police shot Jean Charles seven times in the head. The vague and racist description of his physical appearance, the absence of any heed to the consequences of an act so brutal; in an age of growing awareness of police violence, the fifteen year anniversary of Jean Charles’ murder is a reminder that this problem is far from new, and its potency now is a result only of how long it has been ignored.

It remains a lamentable fact that the only institution as guilty in the murder as those police who shot him and tried to cover it up are the UK media. In the days and years after the killing, smears ran thick and fast. The first drops of misinformation were so wild and erroneous that they have by now earned a renown all of their own. That Jean Charles was wearing a rucksack (he wasn’t) and a “bulky jacket,” not the light denim jacket that could never have concealed the explosive the police and media alleged. Later attempts on the man’s character suggested that he had drugs in his bloodstream, that he was an “illegal” immigrant – both untrue, but even if not so, in no way crimes that would warrant an extrajudicial execution.

In later years, refusing to let rest either the man’s memory nor his family’s peace of mind, the media returned to allege another phoney charge against Jean Charles, this time of sexual assault. But still, it is one of the earliest smears against him that perhaps still carries most resonance of who this man was and wasn’t; the police said, right away, that on entering the station, he “jumped the barrier.” He did no such thing. Jean Charles paid his own way; he was a young man from Brazil for whom the dignity of an honest working life was integral to who he was.

There are still many lessons to be taken from the case of Jean Charles de Menezes. The moral bankruptcy of the UK media; its ability and determination to assassinate characters for the benefit of UK state power. The propensity of the Metropolitan Police towards lethal force, particularly at that time and with a firearm unit clearly pumped-up with an aggression that led to the ‘shoot-first, question later’ policy that killed Jean Charles on his way to work.

As fifteen years passes, however, it is perhaps most important to remember the determination and dignity of the de Menezes family. The shrine, the candle, the flowers, all in the face of police and state intimidation; theirs has been a determination, across a decade and a half, to insist that the life of Jean Charles mattered, that it was to be honoured and fought for, and that it could not be besmirched.

A working-class family from Latin America, they faced down the British state. Against the odds, and the determined efforts of the powerful, their struggle ensured that the name of a Brazilian electrician now stands – wronged but proud – as synonymous with the most egregious abuses of state power in the modern era.

Jean Charles’ family remain in a legal battle with the Metropolitan Police, who they accuse of spying on them. They had a loved one taken from them by this country, and went on to win moral justice – although full legal justice eluded them. In the nobility with which they fought, they gave back to the UK more than we deserved.