A student at the elite Blundell’s boarding school hit two other students while they were sleeping and then attacked a teacher. He has been jailed for life for trying to kill someone.
The teen was given a term at Exeter Crown Court and told he would have to serve at least 12 years for attacking the school in Tiverton, Devon, with a hammer in June of last year.
The suspect, who was only 16 years old at the time, said in court that he had been sleepwalking when he did the violent attacks and could not be held criminally responsible for them.
His roommates, who were 15 and 16 years old at the time, were hit in the head with the claw ends of three claw hammers that he had bought and kept hidden.
Then he attacked his housemaster Henry Roffe-Silvester with the DIY tools. Roffe-Silvester heard the noise and ran to the room to find a “bloodbath.”
After an eight-week hearing, the jury deliberated for about 40 hours before finding him guilty of three counts of attempted murder against the other students and the 39-year-old math and sports teacher.
“They did not know what was coming,” Mrs. Justice Cutts, the judge, said of the victims, who were asleep. They had no way to defend themselves. They were hurt badly.
Mrs. Justice Cutts said he planned the attacks, telling him, “You did that because you meant to kill them on purpose.” You brought a hammer to the scene to use as a tool.
She said, “Both boys might have died” if staff, students, and medical teams hadn’t stepped in.
The attacker “took cover in the online world.”
The judge said, “You knew the difference between right and wrong and had planned to kill those boys and got hammers as weapons.” The boy had been under a lot of stress at the time.
She said that because he had autism, he felt more and more alone living and learning at school and had “retreated into the online world.”
He could cause more bloodshed, which Mrs. Justice Cutts said was a very big threat to the public, and she doesn’t know if he will ever stop being a threat.
She told him that he would have to spend at least 12 years in prison before he could ask for parole.
The boy, who is now 17, was found to have spent the months before the attacks looking into serial killers and different ways to kill. It was also important to him to find out about kid serial killers and whether they were treated well in jail.
The jury was told that he had been listening to dance music and watching a scary TV show in the minutes before the attacks, even though he said he had been sleepwalking.
There was only a short attack before a student called 999 at 00:57 am. This was only seven minutes after the defendant listened to Robin Hustin’s “Light It Up” song, which the judge said was meant to “gee yourself up” and give you the energy “to do what you did.”
The jury was told that the defendant fought with the youngest victim because the victim thought the defendant had made fun of him in science class by laughing at him.
He was also making things worse between the younger victim and himself by liking a 15-year-old girl at the school for both boys and girls.
The boy told the judge during his hearing that he had the hammers to protect himself from the zombie apocalypse, which he thought was real.
The bigger boy’s brain was permanently damaged when bone fragments were forced into it. Neither boy remembered what happened; they only woke up in the hospital after emergency care.
The attack has made it harder for the older victim to do normal things and do his job. But the younger boy has made a “remarkable recovery” and, even though he is still not fully recovered, got great grades in his GCSEs.
Source: Public schoolboy who attacked sleeping pupils with hammer detained for life
