A teenage boy stabbed nine-year-old Aria Thorpe to death and then googled “What happens if you kill” minutes after the attack, a court has heard.
The 16-year-old stabbed Aria once in the chest in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, in December last year. He fled the scene and went to a nearby railway station, where he told a group of young people that he had stabbed a child, Bristol Crown Court heard.
“You’ll see it on the news later,” he told them. “I was playing around with a knife. (She) walked into the knife. I accidentally stabbed her with a really big knife.”
He told one of the group, whom he knew: “Yo (name) I’m a murderer. I accidentally killed someone.” One of the group called the police while another distracted the teen to report what he had been saying.
“He said he had done something really bad and did not know what to do,” one of the children later told police. “He asked if he could search something on Google. He then said, ‘I’m done for. Why have I done this’.”
In a prepared statement to detectives, the teenager said: “I grabbed a knife and stabbed her in the chest. I didn’t use a lot of force, but it was a big knife. I don’t know why I did it, it just happened.
“I walked over and stabbed her. She fell to the floor. I left and went to the train station to get a train and to get away.”
The teen, who cannot be named for legal reasons, denies charges of murder and manslaughter.
Ray Tully KC, prosecuting, told the jury: “He admits that he had hold of the knife in his hand at the time the fatal wound occurred.”
He told the jurors that the defendant had jabbed the knife towards Aria in order to scare her. “He expected her to ‘flinch’,” Mr Tully said. “Instead ‘she moved towards him and was fatally wounded’.
“Soon after the fatal incident, he told a group of young people that Aria had either ‘walked’ or ‘run’ on to the blade of the knife as he was holding it.”
The court heard that emergency services were alerted after Aria’s body was discovered in the house. A post-mortem found that Aria had suffered a single stab wound to the chest and would have “died very swiftly from her injury”.
The defendant had had his mobile phone confiscated before the alleged incident, Mr Tully told the court. “A big part of any young person’s life these days is their use of a mobile phone. It is the means by which they communicate with each other and the rest of the world,” he said. “That appears to have been no different for the defendant. As he said during the police interview, his mobile phone represented ‘freedom’ to him – it was that important to him.
“As part of the investigation, the police have done some work to build up a picture of his use of his phone. The picture that emerged is of someone who was certainly a heavy user of his phone.”
An examination of the phone revealed that the teenager had only slept for three-and-a-half hours the night before the alleged murder, Mr Tully told the hearing.
Referring to the law, the barrister said: “He denies that he bears any criminal responsibility for the death of Aria. He says it was an unfortunate accident. For that reason he has pleaded not guilty to both count one and count two.”
The trial before Mrs Justice O’Farrell continues.
