The family of a nine-year-old girl stabbed to death in her own home have spoken of their anguish after a teenage boy was found not guilty of her murder and manslaughter.
Aria Thorpe died after sustaining a knife wound to her chest at her home in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, on December 15 last year. A 16-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted carrying out the stabbing but claimed it was an accident — telling jurors he had been trying to ‘scare’ her and ‘acted like I was fencing’.
“A 16-year-old boy cleared of murdering nine-year-old Aria Thorpe in a stabbing he claimed was accidental, sparking family outrage.”
At Bristol Crown Court on Thursday, a jury returned verdicts of not guilty to both murder and an alternative charge of manslaughter. As the verdicts were delivered, some members of the public gallery, including Aria’s mother Tori Hull, left the courtroom quietly. The trial judge, Mrs Justice O’Farrell, had earlier warned them not to show any emotion.
During the trial, the boy described picking up an eight-inch (21cm) knife from near the kitchen sink and going into the lounge, where Aria was sitting on the sofa. ‘Aria stood up and I was waving around the knife,’ he told the court. ‘Then at some point I decided that I was going to try to make her flinch and scare her, to get a reaction. I leaned forward, acted like I was fencing.’ He said the knife ‘went into her’ by accident. After pulling it out, he ran to the kitchen, put the knife back in the sink, and left the house without checking on Aria or calling an ambulance. He walked to Worle railway station, where he told a group of children that her death was an ‘accident’.
The judge thanked the jury for their ‘careful attention to all of the evidence’ and acknowledged that it had been ‘a distressing case’. She told the teenager: ‘You have been found not guilty and you will now be taken down to be processed.’
Speaking after the verdict, Aria’s family reacted with anger. ‘How is this justice? What message does this send to society?’ they asked in a statement reported by the Daily Mail. The boy had demonstrated in court moving the knife in a ‘ninja-style’ way before jabbing it towards Aria — a description that left the family struggling to accept the outcome.