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Two men were jailed for life today for murdering a teenage girl and her grandmother by setting fire to their flat as they slept.
David Philip, 19, and Jake Sheehan, 20, torched the property in Mile End after a fight over a £15 debt with another youth who lived there.
At the end of the row Philip shouted: "We'll burn your house down." He carried out his threat - but only Shannen Vickers, 17, and her grandmother Pauline Adams, 57, were in the fifth-floor flat that morning in February.
Philip, of Bow, and Sheehan, of Bethnal Green, were both found guilty on two counts of murder by an Old Bailey jury. They were ordered to serve a minimum of 25 years.
There was cheering and applause from the public gallery as Judge Richard Hawkins announced the sentence, with cries of "Scum" and "You're going to rot" as they were taken down.
The court heard that the two killers siphoned petrol from a motorbike and torched the vehicle. Then they poured the petrol through the letterbox and on to the door before setting it alight, knowing the flat would be occupied.
Both defendants tried to blame each other in court for starting the 6am fire but the jury rejected their stories.
Shannen's mother Nicola, 35, said at the time: "There'd been an argument but she told me not to worry.
"The police told us Shannen and her gran couldn't get out of the house because of the fire. They were together in one room. I just keep thinking that we should have been there. We could have been at the house in 15 minutes if only we'd known they were in danger. It breaks my heart to think of what they must have gone through.
"To lose a mother and a daughter at once. Shannen was my only child, my little girl. She never hurt anyone. What kind of animals could do this?"
