Pupils barricaded themselves in cupboard after fatal school stabbing, jury hears

Independent

14 hours ago

Pupils locked themselves in a school cupboard and barricaded the door after a girl screamed 'someone's been stabbed, there's blood all over', a teenager has told a court.
A jury in the trial of a 15-year-old boy accused of murdering Harvey Willgoose, also 15, at All Saints Catholic High School in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, was played a pre-recorded police interview with the boy on Friday morning.
Jurors have seen footage of how Harvey was stabbed in the heart in a courtyard at the school during the lunch break on February 3.
In his video interview, the boy said he was in a detention room in the school when a girl came in.
'She ran upstairs and started screaming 'someone's been stabbed, there's blood all over',' he told detectives.
'Everyone was, like, screaming.'
The boy said the group of students he was with 'ran into a storage cupboard in the detention hall so we were safe, locked ourselves in and barricaded the door'.
The teenager said he did not need to be told the boy who had been stabbed was Harvey, because '(the defendant) always carried a weapon and Harvey was having a bit of an argument with him'.
The boy described how Harvey and the defendant had been pushing each other at break time earlier that day, but he thought they were just 'messing around'.
'I thought it was a joke,' he said.
And the witness said the pair 'squared up to each other' later in the morning.
Asked about the defendant carrying weapons, the boy said: 'Since he joined the school he used to carry them a lot.'
He said he 'carried a little axe' and 'different types of knives'.
The boy told the detectives: 'He would either show me or tell me to feel the outside of his trousers and there would be an imprint of the top of an axe or something.'
He said this was a few months before the fatal incident.
The jurors have been told that the defendant has admitted manslaughter but denies murder.
He has also admitted possession of a knife on school premises.
The trial has also heard about previous incidents in the school involving the defendant, including one five days before Harvey was stabbed which led to the school going into lockdown.
According to prosecutors, two members of staff physically intervened in a dispute between two other students and the defendant had to be restrained as he tried to get involved.
The jury has been told it was the defendant's claim that one boy had a knife that led the school to go into lockdown, although the police who responded never found a weapon.
Harvey was not in school that day.
The teenager giving evidence on Friday morning said 'there wasn't an issue' between Harvey and the defendant until this lockdown incident.
Addressing the jury earlier this week, 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.'