A TEEN boy stabbed a nine-year-old girl to death at her home then told a group of youngsters “you’ll see it on the news later”, a court heard.
The 16-year-old, who can’t be named, is accused of murdering Aria Thorpe in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, in December last year.
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Aria Thorpe was stabbed to death at a home in Somerset Credit: PA
The youngster suffered a single stab wound to the chest Credit: PA
Bristol Crown Court heard just minutes after allegedly stabbing the youngster once in the chest, he Googled: “What happens if you kill”
The teen then walked to a nearby railway station where he is said to have told young people gathered there that he had stabbed a child.
He added: “You’ll see it on the news later.
“I was playing around with a knife. (She) walked into the knife. I accidentally stabbed her with a really big knife.”
The teen allegedly left the home and said he was a ‘murderer’ Credit: PA
He denies Aria’s murder and is currently on trial Credit: PA
He also allegedly 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 was arrested minutes later sitting on the floor of a carriage of a train waiting to leave the station.
He told police 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.”
Ray Tully KC, prosecuting, said the boy admits he had hold of the knife at the time the fatal wound occured.
But he claimed they were “playfighting” when he “jabbed” the knife towards Aria and said he just wanted to “scare her”, jurors heard.
Mr Tully added: “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 she 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.
The teenager denies charges of murder and manslaughter and the trial continues.
