A teenager said ‘I didn’t come to school to fight’ minutes before he was stabbed to death by another pupil on their lunch break, a court has heard.
Harvey Willgoose, 15, was knifed in the heart in a school courtyard by a 15-year-old boy, who then told teachers: ‘You know I can’t control it.’
The teenage attacker, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has pleaded guilty to Harvey’s manslaughter by reason of loss of control, but is now on trial at Sheffield Crown Court accused of murder.
A member of staff at All Saints Catholic High School in Sheffield, Eleanor Kidder, told the court today that she was supervising an isolation room which had been visited by both Harvey and the defendant on the day of the attack, February 3.
Harvey had come into the room after he and the defendant squared up to each other in a science lesson around an hour before he was stabbed.
Ms Kidder said: ‘He was agitated, annoyed, heightened emotionally. He said there had been an argument in science with [the defendant].
‘He said he had made contact with him, [the defendant] had held on to Harvey’s collar I believe and he said [the defendant] pretended to take something out of his trousers.
‘He seemed annoyed. He told me he thought there might be an altercation on that day, but he had been reassured by another student that everything was calm.’
Ms Kidder said Harvey had told her he had a disagreement with the defendant over the weekend on social media.
Asked by prosecutor Richard Thyne KC how Harvey had felt about the falling out, she said: ‘Irritated. He said he didn’t come to school to fight, so I don’t think he came expecting that to take place, from what Harvey said.’
Morgan Davis, the assistant head of the school, described how he had persuaded the defendant to hand over the knife in the moments after the attack.
In a recorded police interview that was played to the jury today, he said: ‘I could quite clearly see [the defendant] with the knife. It was in his right hand.
‘He looked a bit scared…certainly he looked a bit scared and in shock and he just kept repeating “you know I can’t control it, you know I can’t control it”.’
Mr Davis told police that the defendant had a history of anger issues at the school and he assumed his words had been a reference to this.
‘That’s when I reached my hand out and took the knife from him,’ he said.
‘He did give it to me, he didn’t resist.’
The jury previously heard the defendant was involved in an altercation with another pupil the week before the killing, that saw the school placed into lockdown over a knife scare.
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.
The two pupils were suspended and the defendant was asked to go home for the day. Harvey was not in school that day.
On the day of the fatal attack, the defendant had asked if he could skip his PE lesson because he did not want to see the friends of the pupil with whom he had been in a disagreement.
Mr Davis said he had spoken to the defendant to try to reassure him after the knife scare – before asking him if he had come to school armed.
‘I said “and obviously you’re coming back into school, so how are you feeling? You’ve not brought anything in, have you?” and he said “no, no, no, no, nothing like that, I’m happy to be back in school”.’
After being excused from PE, the defendant was sent to Ms Kidder’s room.
She told the court that the defendant had claimed he had seen associates of the boy with whom he had the altercation in his neighbourhood ‘staring at him’ in the days since the lockdown.
The defendant then said he had got the boy’s address and claimed he would go there to ‘kick the s*** out of him’, before insisting he was only joking.
Ms Kidder said: ‘He was laughing, he was joking, he was not agitated, he was calm, laughing.’
Jurors have seen CCTV footage of Harvey being stabbed twice in a courtyard at the school at the start of the lunch break on February 3.
The jurors have been told 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 last week, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC, defending, said that the defendant would argue that his actions were manslaughter by loss of control due to a history of bullying.
He 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.’
The trial continues.