Public schoolboy accused of bludgeoning sleeping students and teacher was ‘sleepwalking’, court hears

The 16-year-old was wearing just his boxers when he attacked the boys and housemaster at Blundell’s School

A teenager has gone on trial accused of attempting to murder two boys and a housemaster at Blundell’s School in Devon (PA)

A public schoolboy who bludgeoned two sleeping students and a teacher with hammers at a boarding school was sleepwalking at the time, a court has heard.

The 16-year-old was wearing just his boxer shorts when he attacked the two boys and the housemaster at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon.

Exeter Crown Court heard that the teenager, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, had armed himself with three claw hammers.

The jury has previously heard that the two boys were asleep in cabin-style beds in one of the school’s boarding houses when the defendant climbed up and attacked them shortly before 1am on 9 June last year.

Housemaster Henry Roffe-Silvester, who was asleep in his own quarters, was awoken by noises coming from the boarding house and went to investigate.

When he entered the bedroom where the attack had happened, he saw a silhouetted figure standing in the room who turned towards him and repeatedly struck him over the head with a hammer.

Setting out the defendant’s case, Kerim Fuad KC told the jury the teenager accepted carrying out the attacks but was not guilty of attempted murder because he was sleepwalking.

The barrister said the two boys were the defendant’s “friends and dormmates”.

“He had no reason nor intention to kill them,” Mr Fuad said.

“He had no reason, no intention to kill his housemaster, Mr Roffe-Silvester.

“The defence case is that the defendant can only have been consumed in an episode of sleepwalking to have committed these extraordinary acts, so was not conscious and awake.”

Devon and Cornwall Police were called to the site of Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon, following reports of a serious assault (PA)

Mr Fuad said it was “not in issue” that the defendant had taken a “hammer or hammers” to the two boys and Mr Roffe-Silvester.

“It is not in issue that he caused these awful, awful injuries,” he said. “Nothing can diminish, nor do we at any stage seek to lessen, the horror of the incident or what these boys went through. What is in issue is what caused a 16-year-old boy to strike the heads of his two dorm-mates in such a horror-film way, to then only strike out at his housemaster?

“Was he awake and he intended to kill each one of them, or maybe he had been sleepwalking and therefore was not conscious? In fact, he can never have hoped to get away with it. So why? And the answer to that lies at the very heart of the issues.

“No one can be guilty of committing such an offence whilst asleep – you have to be fully conscious. You have to be fully conscious and in control of your actions to be criminally liable for them.”

Mr Fuad told jurors that at the time of the attack, the defendant was being blackmailed over the internet by someone who was demanding £400.

“You will hear the defendant was being blackmailed at the time by a fraudster on the internet to whom he was having to pay sums of money just before this incident,” he said. “You will hear more detail of the subject matters that he was researching on the internet on his iPad.

“You will hear of the state which the defendant was in from several eyewitnesses.”

James Dawes KC, prosecuting, had previously told the jury that an examination of the defendant’s iPad revealed he had been listening to music on Spotify moments before launching the assaults.

Concluding the opening of the crown’s case, Mr Dawes said the police had attempted to establish a motive for the attacks.

“The investigation has uncovered an obsession that the defendant had with one of the boys,” he said. “An obsession with hammers as weapons, and an obsession with killing and killers and the killing of children.

“It may not be palatable, and it may not be particularly logical, but it appears to be an obsession which he carried out. These are deliberate actions, and he rained blows down on their unprotected sleeping heads with heavy hammers. He used both sides of the hammer, including the sharp claw.

“Those hammers he had purchased in advance – again, a choice he made months in advance of this attack. These violent actions were repeated again and again.

“We say that the evidence, when you look at it in the round, is consistent with him acting deliberately, and really that there was no other explanation for his actions other than his intention to kill them.”

The defendant, now aged 17, denies three charges of attempted murder.

The trial was adjourned until Wednesday.