A 16-year-old student has been found not guilty of attempting to murder his history teacher after prosecutors said he stabbed her in the head with a kitchen knife inside an empty classroom at a secondary school in Wales.
A jury at Swansea Crown Court instead convicted the teenager of wounding with intent and unlawful wounding over the Feb. 5 attack on teacher Vicki Williams at Milford Haven Comprehensive School in Pembrokeshire.
The boy, who cannot be identified because of his age, had already pleaded guilty to possessing a kitchen knife on school grounds. He is due to be sentenced on Sept. 3.
According to the BBC, the student was 15 at the time of the attack. He allegedly followed Williams into her empty classroom after asking for help with his history work.
Once they were inside, he closed the classroom door, pulled a knife from his bag and lunged at her, prosecutors said.
Williams told the court she immediately became suspicious when the teenager shut the door and claimed he had done so because the room was cold.
“I ask him again, ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ And then he pulls [the knife] out of the bag and lunges at me,” she testified, according to the BBC.
Williams suffered injuries to her head, back and hands during the attack. She told jurors that she grabbed the knife, pushed the teenager away with her legs and screamed desperately for help.
At one point, she believed she was going to die.
“I’m fearful that I am dying. I’ve seen the knife, I know I’ve been stabbed, all I’m thinking at that point is, ‘I need help,’” Williams told the court.
She said the attack “came out of nowhere” and described the expression on the student’s face as one of “pure hatred.”
A fellow staff member rushed to help after hearing what prosecutors described as Williams’ “gut-wrenching” screams. Surveillance footage later showed the teenager running away from the school following the stabbing, according to the BBC.
Police arrested him at his grandmother’s home after he allegedly told her that “something went” in his head.
His grandmother testified that the boy was crying and sitting with his head hanging low in his hands.
During the trial, the teenager gave a different account of what happened. He claimed Williams noticed the knife and tried to take it from him, leading to a struggle in which he “accidentally assaulted her.”
He also insisted he had brought the weapon to school as part of a game with friends. According to his testimony, the students would bring random household items onto school grounds to see what they could “get away with.”
The teenager said he chose the largest knife from a knife block at his home because it was “the most impressive one to show his friends.”
When his defense attorney asked whether he wanted teachers to discover the knife, the boy answered, “No.”
He denied intending to use the weapon violently, deliberately injuring Williams or harboring any resentment toward his history teacher.
After approximately four hours of deliberations, Judge Paul Thomas KC accepted a majority verdict on the wounding-with-intent charge. That meant at least 10 members of the jury agreed on the verdict, according to the BBC.
Was the teacher a liberal leftist???