The family of a woman who was sexually assaulted and murdered as she walked home have said they are “tortured” with the thought her death was preventable.
Law graduate Zara Aleena, 35, was killed by Rochester man Jordan McSweeney in June 2022.
McSweeney was handed a life sentence with a minimum of 38 years at the Old Bailey six months after Zara was killed as she walked home from a night out in Ilford.
In November 2023, he won a Court of Appeal bid to reduce the minimum term of his life sentence.
During an inquest into her niece’s death, Zara’s aunt, Farah Naz, told the jury at East London Coroner’s Court in Walthamstow on Monday that the family is “tortured with the thought Zara’s death was preventable”.
She added that her niece’s murder highlighted “the crumbling justice system (which is) meant to protect us”.
Ms Naz said: “Since her death we have been campaigning so that our daughters, sisters, friends can be safe and protected as Zara never was. This is Zara’s legacy.”
Ms Naz told the jury of her niece’s “sparkling eyes and curly jet black hair” and “glorious laughter,” before explaining Zara, who was was a carer for her mother and grandmother, was the "rock of our family”.
She described her niece as “a carefree spirit with the most caring heart” and said she had worked to help resettle refugees in the UK.
Ms Naz continued: “2022 was to be her year to live her wildest dreams. She wanted to buy her own home, find Mr Right and to have children. The future looked bright. “One of the things she used to confidently say is ‘I know I’m a good person’. If she were able to speak here today she would say ‘I didn’t do anything wrong’.”
Ms Naz said Zara walked everyone but on that one night as she returned home she was sexually assaulted and murdered, before adding: “Her future was brutally taken.”
McSweeney had been released from prison on licence on June 17 2022 and, after breaching the conditions of his licence, a decision was made to recall him to prison on June 24 2022.
On Monday, area coroner Nadia Persaud said the purpose of the inquest is to “consider the circumstance by which Zara came by her death, which will include whether any actions or omissions of state bodies contributed to her death”.
The jury was told that McSweeney was 29 at the time of the attack and had received his first custodial sentence at the age of 13, with much of his adult years spent in prison or in the community under licence.
Ms Persaud, reading a statement from a consultant forensic pathologist, said the cause of Ms Aleena’s death was blunt force head injury and neck compression.
The inquest continues.
