A 15-year-old boy has told a jury he does not remember stabbing a fellow pupil to death at their school and denied he had worked himself “up into a rage”.
The teenager was repeatedly shown CCTV footage of the moment he stabbed Harvey Willgoose, also 15, twice in the chest at All Saints Catholic High School in Sheffield – sometimes in slow motion.
But the boy said his memory of what happened stopped “just before I stabbed him”.
Richard Thyne KC, prosecuting, took the boy moment by moment through the CCTV footage of the incident on Thursday, asking him: “Are you saying that you don’t remember any of that?”
The boy, who was giving evidence for a sixth day in his trial, said: “Yes.”
Mr Thyne said: “The prosecution case is that you had not lost control of your actions.”
The defendant replied: “Well, I did lose control.”
The prosecutor then asked him if he had “worked yourself up into a rage about Harvey”.
The boy said: “I didn’t get myself worked up over Harvey.”
Mr Thyne said: “The prosecution case is what you can see there is controlled aggression by you. What do you say about that?
The defendant replied: “There wasn’t control.”
The prosecutor said: “When you stabbed Harvey in the chest, in that moment you intended either to kill him or cause him really serious harm. What do you say about that?”
The boy told the jury: “No, I didn’t.”
Mr Thyne said: “Having seen now what you did, what kind of harm do you think you intended?”
He replied: “I didn’t intend no harm to him.”
Mr Thyne said: “Are you saying that you can’t remember the stabbing as you don’t want to tell the jury the real answer?”
The boy said: “No.”
The jury has heard All Saints’ headteacher Sean Pender describe how the defendant said “I’m not right in the head” shortly after the stabbing.
The boy told the jury on Thursday that this was not right and he had said “my head’s not right” to Mr Pender.
Mr Thyne said: “Are you trying to twist things now?” and the boy said: “No.”
The prosecutor pointed out that, according to Mr Pender, the defendant told the head that he had stabbed Harvey twice but now he could not remember.
The boy said: “It was in the moment and it was, like, three minutes after I stabbed him.”
When Mr Thyne put to him that “you intended to cause him really serious harm”, the defendant said: “I didn’t intend nothing.”
He said: “I didn’t deliberately stab him.”
The court has heard that the defendant, who cannot be named, has admitted manslaughter but denies murder.
He has also admitted possession of a knife on school premises.
Addressing the jury at the beginning of the trial, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC, defending, said: “(The defendant) did not set out to kill or seriously hurt anyone.
“The defence say (the defendant’s) actions that day were the end result of a long period of bullying, poor treatment and violence, things that built one upon another until he lost control and did tragically what we’ve all seen.”
