Teenager stabbed nine year-girl to death - court hears
Trial gets underway at Bristol Crown Court
Last updated 3 hours ago
A teenage boy googled “What happens if you kill” minutes after stabbing a nine-year-old girl to death, a court heard.
The 16-year-old stabbed Aria Thorpe once in the chest at a house in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, in December last year.
After fleeing the property, he walked to a nearby railway station where he told young people gathered there 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, who he knew: “Yo (name) I’m a murderer. I accidentally killed someone.”
While one of them distracted the teenager, another was able to ring police and alert them to what the defendant was saying.
One of the children later told police: “He said he had done something really bad and did not know what to do.
“He asked if he could search something on Google. He then said, ‘I’m done for. Why have I done this’.”
The teenager, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was arrested minutes later sitting on the floor of a carriage of a train waiting to leave the station.
The teenager told detectives in a prepared statement: “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 teenager 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 says at the time they were ‘playfighting’ when he ‘jabbed’ the knife towards Aria, that was done in order to ‘scare her’.
“He expected her to ‘flinch’. 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 a friend of Aria’s family discovered her body in the house and alerted the emergency services.
A post-mortem examination found Aria had suffered a single stab wound to the chest and would have “died very swiftly from her injury”.
Mr Tully told the court the defendant had had his mobile phone confiscated prior to the alleged incident.
“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.”
Mr Tully said that the phone examination showed that the teenager had no more than three-and-a-half hours sleep the night before the alleged murder.
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.