By The Guardian (World News) | Created at 2024-10-02 13:45:17 | Updated at 2024-10-03 19:26:41
1 day ago
Two teachers who were repeatedly stabbed by a 13-year-old girl in a school playground in south Wales believed they were going to be killed in the attack, a jury has heard.
Fiona Elias, an assistant headteacher, said when the teenager began stabbing her during the morning breaktime at Ysgol Dyffryn Aman in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, she thought: “I’m going to die.”
Liz Hopkin, a colleague who tried to help Elias, told how when she was stabbed in the neck herself, she thought: “Shit, this is it.” She described her blood pooling about her as paramedics and an air ambulance were scrambled to the scene.
The girl, who cannot be named, has admitted wounding the two teachers and a pupil but denies attempting to murder them.
During a police interview played to the jury on Wednesday, Elias described being approached by the girl as she chatted to Hopkin on a sunny morning in April.
Elias said: “She [the teenager] was looking at me with these eyes. It was so sinister … very distant, very menacing, just looking at me like she was going to do something to me. She was playing with something in her pocket.”
The girl allegedly asked her: “Do you want to see what’s in my pocket?” and pulled out a silver-bladed multi-tool as used for fishing.
Elias said: “When she started stabbing me, I thought, I’m going to die. I thought that was it. Her arms were everywhere. She was trying to stab me wherever she could get to. I remember thinking, oh God, this could be it.
“She had lost it. The red mist had come down. She was saying: ‘I want to fucking kill you, I’m going to fucking kill you, I want to kill you.’”
Elias was wounded in the arm and hand. She became tearful as she described finding blood had been drawn. “I was very shaken up.”
In her police interview, Hopkin said that before the attack, the girl had been staring unblinkingly at Elias.
Hopkin continued: “She got a knife out her pocket. I tried to hold her arms down, she was still trying to get to Fiona. We were spinning round. She stabbed me. I tried to keep hold.”
But the girl escaped Hopkin’s grasp. “She came towards me face on and stabbed me in the neck. I remember thinking, shit, this is it.
“I felt like, she’s going to kill me now and that will be it. This is the end. She went for my neck and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her.”
Hopkin sustained leg, chest, shoulder and neck injuries. She compared the knife entering her to “a really hot sting”.
“It felt very powerful,” she said. “Though there were hundreds of kids around, everything seemed silent.”
When the girl stopped attacking her, Hopkin was taken inside. She said: “I could see lots of blood. It didn’t register it was mine. It was coming down the steps, out of my neck and leg, it was pooling.”
Asked how she felt, she said: “I’m just glad to be alive and glad Fiona is alive. If I hadn’t intervened, she could be dead now.”
After attacking the two teachers, the defendant, who is now 14, stabbed a pupil, injuring her in the arm, the court was told.
Swansea crown court has heard that as she was taken away by police, the girl said: “That’s one way to be a celebrity”, adding: “I’m pretty sure this is going to be on the news so more eyes are going to be looking at me.”
The trial continues.
