Two boys with Ava White on the night she died were carrying a "Rambo knife", a witness said.
Ava, 12, was stabbed in the neck in Liverpool city centre. A 14-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, denies her murder and manslaughter.
Boy A, from South Liverpool, accepts stabbing Ava with a flick knife, but says he "didn't mean to" and was "trying to get her away from me". He has told a jury he thought she was a boy, who might be armed, and feared she was going to "batter" him.
READ MORE: Ava White trial hears boy's reason for carrying flick knife
Liverpool Crown Court has heard Ava and her friends argued with Boy A and his friends - Boys B to D - about them filming her on Snapchat, when she was lying on the ground on November 25 last year. A jury has heard two masked boys came over - who the ECHO has referred to as Boys F and G - and told Boy C, 16, to delete a video.
Boy A has told the jury he heard Boy F tell his then 15-year-old friend Boy C: "Delete the f***ing video now or I'm gonna stab you." In his police interview, he said one of Boy F and Boy G "had a blade to Boy C's belly" while saying "delete the video now".
He told the jury he didn't see any blade, but saw Boy F with his hand down his waistband. He said he tried to pull Boy C away and minutes later, Boy C told him it had been a "big knife".
Jurors today watched a police interview with an autistic man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, who was out that night with his girlfriend. Nick Johnson, QC, defending, first explained what he said "the point of this is".
He told the jury when Boy F gave evidence, he said he left Ava's group as they walked down Tarleton Street towards Church Street. Boy F said he later received a phone call and he and Boy G ran to Church Alley, near to where Ava was stabbed in School Lane, at 8.35pm.
Mr Johnson said: "This evidence fills in that gap. The importance of this evidence is as Boy F and Boy G ran down what you and I know as the Gyratory, in other words Hood Street... not only did they run past some video cameras at Yates [bar], but they also ran past a witness.
"The witness saw Boy F pass to Boy G, or Boy G pass to Boy F, what he described as a 'Rambo knife'. So you can already see what the significance of that is, in the face of what Boy A says happened in Williamson Square."
The QC added: "We suggest - it won't surprise you - this is highly significant. Not least in the light of Boy A's evidence."
Mr Johnson said the recording of the police interview "contains the evidence the defence want to rely on, which the prosecution don't want to clarify, or, most importantly we would say, dispute."
He said the prosecution and defence agreed Boy F and Boy G joined a group of youths including Ava and Boy A at the junction of Williamson Square and Richmond Street at 8.27pm.
Boy F and Boy G walked into Tarleton Street at 8.29pm, back to Williamson Square at 8.34pm and at 8.37pm were seen running down Hood Street, where they were shown on CCTV at Yates's. This was after Ava had been stabbed.
Two days later, the autistic man's mum rang the police to report what he had seen. He was interviewed on March 16.
The witness said he was waiting outside Yates, while his girlfriend was inside using a toilet. He said two people ran down the road and "one of them passed the other one a knife".
The man said when his girlfriend came out, he told her he had "just seen two criminals". He text his mum and when she rang him, he told her the same.
He said the two people he described as teenagers were shouting and the taller of the pair passed the shorter one a knife. The witness said he and his girlfriend had seen them earlier, near the MerseyTravel centre, further up the road.
He said: "We saw them and said 'they're up to something - there's something shady about them. They were just stood there next to each other, not talking, they had balaclavas on."
The witness said: "It was like, not a knife you see in your kitchen, one of the ones from movies, something like that. A Rambo style knife."
Gesturing with his fingers to indicate the size of the knife, he said it was "about that long". The man said it was black, with a black handle and a straight blade.
Police asked him why he thought the two people were "criminals". The witness replied: "It's not normal to have a knife on people."
Mr Johnson played the jury two CCTV clips of Boy F and Boy G running past the witness. He then read out further agreed facts, including that at the time of the stabbing, Boy A was 4ft 11in and weighed 6st 1lb.
The QC said except for possession of an offensive weapon that night - the knife he used to stab Ava - Boy A had no previous convictions. He said: "That's the defence case."
High Court judge Mrs Justice Amanda Yip said that concluded the evidence in the trial. She gave legal directions to the jury about the difference between murder and manslaughter, about the law on self-defence, and their route to verdict, before sending the jury home for the weekend.
The trial will resume on Monday with closing speeches for the prosecution and defence.
(Proceeding)
