Teen Googled ‘what happens if you kill’ minutes after stabbing girl to death, court hears
Minutes after stabbing a nine-year-old girl to death, a teenage boy Googled “What happens if you kill?”, a court heard. he heard him calling.
The 16-year-old stabbed Aria Thorpe in the chest at a house in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, in December last year.
Bristol Crown Court heard that after fleeing the property he walked to a nearby railway station where he told gathered youths that he had stabbed a child.
“You’ll see it on the news later,” he told them.
“I was playing with the knife. (He) walked towards the knife. I accidentally stabbed him with a very large knife.”
He told someone he knew in the group: “Hey (name) I’m a murderer. I killed someone by mistake.”
While one of them distracted the young man, the other managed to call the police and warn them about what the defendant said.
One of the boys later told police: “He said he did something really bad and didn’t know what to do.
“He asked if he could Google something. Then he said, ‘I’m done. Why did I do that?'”
The young man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was arrested minutes later while sitting on the floor of a train carriage waiting to leave the station.
“I took a knife and stabbed him 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,” the teen told detectives in a prepared statement.
“I walked up to him and stabbed him. He fell to the ground. So I left and went to the train station to get on the train and get away from there.”
The teenager denies the charges of murder and manslaughter.
Prosecutor Ray Tully KC told the jury: “He admits he had the knife in his hand when the fatal wound was inflicted.
“He said they were playing ‘fight’ at the time and he ‘deflected’ the knife at Aria, this was done to ‘scare her’.
“He expected her to ‘run away’, but instead she ‘advanced towards him and was fatally injured.’
“Shortly after the fatal incident, he told a group of teenagers that Aria was either ‘walking’ or ‘running’ towards the tip of the knife in her hand.”
The court heard that a friend of Aria’s family found her body at home and alerted emergency services.
The autopsy revealed that Aria had a single stab wound in her chest.
The hearing before Mrs Justice O’Farrell continues.
