Two teachers who were stabbed repeatedly 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 pupil 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: “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 fellow 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, shortly after telling the pupil she was not allowed in a hall where she had been sitting with friends.
Elias said: “She [the teenager] was looking at me with these eyes. It was so sinister … very distant, very menacing. 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. Her arms were everywhere. She was trying to stab me wherever she could. 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.
In her police interview, Hopkin said: “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.
Hopkin sustained leg, chest, shoulder and neck injuries. She compared the knife entering her to “a really hot sting”.
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.”
Fiona Harris, a teacher who witnessed the attack, said: “I could see Liz trying to dodge but it was such close proximity that I can only describe Liz as being like a pin cushion.”
After attacking the two teachers, the defendant, who is now 14, stabbed another pupil, injuring her in the arm, the court was told.
Darrel Campbell, the former assistant headteacher at the school, said the girl let out a scream “like something out of a horror movie”, telling the pupil: “I’m going to fucking kill you, you bitch.”
In her police interview, also played in court, the pupil who was attacked said: “She was trying to stab me multiple times.” The witness said they had a “petty school girls’ argument” a couple of months before but it was quickly resolved.
The trial continues.
