Patricia da Silva Armani was living with her cousin Jean Charles de Menezes in a flat in south London two decades ago when he was shot seven times in the head by firearms officers at Stockwell station. Her younger cousin was a chatterbox and a dreamer, she says, “always with plans”.
The pair had grown up together as part of a large and close family. Two years after De Menezes had moved to London for a life that Brazil was unable to offer, “Paty”, as he affectionately called her, had been encouraged to follow him to his two-bedroom flat on Scotia Road, along with their younger cousin Vivian Figueiredo, then 20.
