A FATHER who claims his teenage daughter was accidentally killed when he threw a knife during a kitchen play-fight told police: ‘I must be the unluckiest man in the world’.
Simon Vickers, 50, is accused of murdering Scarlett Vickers at their home in Darlington, Co Durham, on July 5 last year.
The 14-year-old died from catastrophic blood loss after the blade penetrated 11cm deep into her chest and pierced her heart.
Prosecutors claim Vickers must have stabbed his daughter ‘deliberately with the knife’.
Vickers, who denies murder and manslaughter, claims the pair were just ‘mucking around’ when tragedy struck.
In a police interview, played at Teesside Crown Court, Vickers told officers he believed he had thrown a pair of kitchen tongs at Scarlett, after the pair were ‘messing about’ throwing grapes at each other.
He said: ‘We were horse-playing. I must be the unluckiest man in the world.’
Vickers said the tragedy occurred while Scarlett’s mother Sarah Hall was cooking spaghetti bolognese for dinner.
He told interviewing officers: ‘Sarah was cooking tea. We have a breakfast table the other side. Scarlett was sat on one side, I was sat on the other.
‘She had grapes and we started throwing grapes at each other. A few splattered on the wall. Then I went to try to get her and she pushed me away and I threw the tongs at her.’
Vickers added: ‘F***ing hell. I can’t believe this has happened. We were just mucking about in the kitchen. I can’t believe how this has happened.’
Teesside Crown Court heard that Vickers had smoked cannabis and shared two bottles of wine with his partner, Sarah, in the hours before Scarlett died.
He insisted to police that he had a ‘good relationship’ with his only child Scarlett, and a ‘good family life’.
He said the family had been looking forward to a holiday in Gran Canaria, Spain, six weeks later.
The prosecution allege that the wound was ‘too deep’ to have been caused accidentally and the knife must have been firmly in Vickers’s hand.
Jurors were told by a Home Office pathologist that it would be ‘practically impossible’ for a thrown knife to cause Scarlett’s fatal chest wound.
Vickers told detectives he had not realised he had thrown a knife, telling them: ‘I picked up tongs 100 percent. I just saw the tongs and picked them up.’
He added: ‘Virtually in a split second I went to sit down. All of a sudden there was a noise ‘argh’ and then we saw the blood.
‘There was like a second or two, and then we saw the colour come through her clothes and that’s when we panicked like mad.
‘We started shouting ‘ring 999’. I started to ring 999 but I couldn’t work the f***ing phone at all for some reason, so Sarah rang it. While she was trying to get though, I was shouting ‘Scarlett, Scarlett.
‘Her lips were going bluer and bluer and there was no response. She was there but she wasn’t there.
‘I was shouting at her, trying to get her to wake up.’
Vickers denied telling paramedics at the scene that he picked up a knife and that it ‘just went in’ after Scarlett ‘lunged towards me’.
He added: ‘There is no way in the world I would stab my child. I threw those tongs at her.
‘I want to die myself. My only child – I don’t know what to say. I can’t even cry. I don’t even know what’s wrong.
‘We were having a good night, a good day, there was nothing untoward.
‘My world has just gone to s*** basically.’
Jurors previously heard that Vickers appeared ‘heavily intoxicated’ to a police officer who arrived at the family’s semi-detached home in Geneva Road shortly after 10.50pm.
In a 999 call made by Scarlett’s mother, Sarah Hall, she told an emergency operator: ‘We were messing about, having a fun-fight. My partner threw something and he didn’t realise.’
Opening the case, Mark McKone, KC, told jurors: ‘The knife must have been held firmly in the defendant’s hand at the time of the stabbing, with the defendant having a firm wrist and a firm elbow.
‘The knife must have been firmly in the defendant’s hand to cause that wound, which was 11cm deep.
‘The wound is too deep to have been caused accidentally.’
In defence, Nicholas Lumley, KC, said Vickers ‘had no desire to harm’ Scarlett.
He said: ‘They had been messing around together in the kitchen, in a normal playful way, and Simon Vickers suddenly realised that Scarlett had been injured.
‘Her body must have come into contact with a sharp knife and she quickly died as a result of a single knife wound.
‘Simon Vickers will bear moral responsibility for his daughter’s death for the rest of his life.’
Vickers is set to give evidence on Monday. The trial continues.