Leighton Amies, 15, stabbed Tomasz Oleszak, 14, fatally in his chest at a park in Gateshead last October. A judge has allowed him to be named and identified in the media after ruling it to be in the ‘public interest’.
Notably, Amies was braggadocios about the heinous crime and said “I’ve wetted your boy” to the victim’s friend, with “wet” being slang for “kill”.
In court, Amies did deny murder, but during the trial jurors head how the defendant was travelling through Whitehills Nature Park with his girlfriend at roughly 8pm when a group began following him. He had a kitchen knife in his jacket.
At some point there was conflict and the defendant used it to fatally strike the victim. It was immediately after doing this that he loudly boasted to the victim’s friend “I’ve wetted your boy”.
Mark McKone KC, prosecuting, told jurors: “He wanted them to know he had stabbed one of their number.
“It was a boast.”
Peter Makepeace KC, defending, asked the court to discern the facts from a different perspective. He told jurors ‘Amies had not seeked out trouble on the fatal day, and that they should put themselves in his position: aged 14, attacked by a group, in the dark, and not knowing if any of them were armed themselves’
In releasing his identity to the media the judge said: “There is a public interest in trying to deflect young people from the carrying of knives, where when that happens, this kind of utterly tragic outcome can occur.”
Mr Justice Spencer added: “In my judgement, the public interest in reporting fully of these proceedings, including the identity of the defendant, in fact outweighs the interests of the defendant in having the anonymity of his identity maintained.”
The judge let the jurors know he acknowledged it had been a particularly emotional experience and offered to exempt them from jury service for five years.
