FINAL HOURS Tragic Aria Thorpe’s mum reveals nine-year-old’s last words before she was ‘stabbed to death at home by teen boy’
THE mum of a nine-year-old girl allegedly stabbed to death by a teen boy today described their final moments together before the horror.
Aria Thorpe was allegedly murdered by a 16-year-old, who can’t be named, in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, on December 15 last year.
Her mum Victoria Hull – known as Tori – told jurors at Bristol Crown Court how she had collected Aria from a dance class that night at around 4.30pm.
The mum said: “Aria said she had a really good day.
“We went to Aldi and got mini-pizzas and toppings. We got home at 4.45pm and made the pizzas.
“Aria was eating her pizza, sitting on the sofa in the living room. She was watching YouTube on the television.”
Victoria said she had cut her daughter’s pizza using scissors so Aria was using her hands to eat it.
She continued: “Aria seemed bubbly and happy because she had a good dance class.
“Aria asked me if she could have the last Oreo after her food and I said yes.
“She said something like ‘see you after work mummy’. I replied ‘see you after work, love you’.”
Victoria then headed out to work at Pontins, where she was doing evening shifts to earn extra money for Christmas.
She became aware people were trying to contact her and left work, arriving at a friend’s house at 7.18pm.
“The police were there,” she added.
“This is when I found out about Aria. I phoned my mum. Female police officers took me to my parents’ house.
“It was all a blur.”
Jurors heard how the teen defendant had allegedly fled the home after the horror and walked to a nearby railway station.
Once there, he told a group of youths he was “playing around” with Aria when he “accidentally stabbed her with a really big knife”.
He also claimed he expected Aria to “flinch” when he “jabbed the knife” towards her in an attempt to “scare her”, it was said.
He also allegedly told one of the group, who he knew: “Yo (name) I’m a murderer. I accidentally killed someone.”
The boy also told the group of youngsters: “You’ll see it on the news later.”
One witness told the court today her friends “didn’t believe him” but his “hand was shaking like he had actually done it”.
She said that one of her friends jokingly asked the defendant if he had killed Aria.
The witness added: “He smiled and didn’t deny, but didn’t say yeah. Everybody thought he was joking.
“So he left her on the floor. I can’t remember if he said he had called an ambulance, but he left his phone and took his coat and ran out of the door.”
While one of them distracted the teenager, another was able to ring police and alert them to what the defendant was saying.
One of the children later told police: “He said he had done something really bad and did not know what to do.
“He asked if he could search something on Google. He then said, ‘I’m done for. Why have I done this’.”
Meanwhile, family friend Ollie Sheppard had gone to the home when he found tragic Aria lying dead on the ground.
Ray Tully KC, prosecuting, asked: “What was your first thought when you saw her on the floor?”
Mr Sheppard replied: “She was messing around. I called her name, Aria, and pretty much I had put two and two together and I saw blood on her arm.
“My first instinct was to ring her mother. She didn’t answer because she was at work, so I left her a note she needed to contact me asap and then I called 999.”
The teen boy was arrested minutes later sitting on the floor of a carriage of a train waiting to leave the station.
He told police in a prepared statement: “I grabbed a knife and stabbed her in the chest.
“I didn’t use a lot of force, but it was a big knife. I don’t know why I did it, it just happened.
“I walked over and stabbed her. She fell to the floor. I left and went to the train station to get a train and to get away.”
A post-mortem examination found Aria had suffered a single stab wound to the chest and would have “died very swiftly from her injury”.
Mr Tully told the court the defendant had had his mobile phone confiscated prior to the alleged incident.
“A big part of any young person’s life these days is their use of a mobile phone. It is the means by which they communicate with each other and the rest of the world,” he said.
“That appears to have been no different for the defendant. As he said during the police interview, his mobile phone represented ‘freedom’ to him – it was that important to him.
“As part of the investigation, the police have done some work to build up a picture of his use of his phone.
“The picture that emerged is of someone who was certainly a heavy user of his phone.”
Mr Tully said that the phone examination showed that the teenager had no more than three-and-a-half hours sleep the night before the alleged murder.
The teenager denies charges of murder and manslaughter and the trial continues.
