Teen accused of murder wanted to die, trial told

A trial is underway after Jahziah Coke, 13, was fatally stabbed last August

A teenager accused of murdering a 13-year-old boy used a friend's phone to look for train tickets to Paris and said he wanted to die, a court has been told.

Jahziah Coke was stabbed in the stomach and chest and was found dead in a house in Oldbury, near Birmingham, by paramedics responding to a 999 call on 29 August.

Wolverhampton Crown Court was told that the boy accused of murdering Jahziah fled the scene and caught a bus to a female friend's house. He denies murder and manslaughter.

A second boy was also charged with murder but had the case against him dropped before the trial started.

Neither the boys nor the friend could be named due to their ages.

In video evidence played to the court on Tuesday, the girl told police that the boys were "stressed and sweaty" when they arrived at her flat at around 18:30 BST on the evening of the alleged murder last summer.

"He's usually smiling and excited, but he was serious and so sweaty," she said when asked by police what the defendant's demeanour was like.

"I could smell their sweat. You could tell there was something wrong."

'He was crying in my arms'

She said the defendant asked to use her phone, and she saw he was looking on Google at train tickets to both Erdington and Paris.

The girl also told officers that she jokingly asked if he was "going to kill someone" after he asked her for some bleach, which she gave him, and he "laughed nervously" in response.

After hearing from a friend on Snapchat that Jahziah had died and there were rumours that the defendant was responsible, she said the two boys were "confused" and did not believe he had died.

When she asked the defendant if it was true, she said he became emotional and she hugged him.

She said: "It made me upset. I was comforting them both. [The defendant] said he wanted to die, I said no.

"He kept saying it shouldn't have happened. He said he was sorry to everybody he knows. He was crying in my arms, and I was telling him it would be okay."

Emergency teams found Jahziah in a house last summer

At around 22:00 BST, the girl's mother said the boys needed to leave, but when the girl told her about the accusations the defendant was facing, she told the girl to go out and get them to come back.

The girl ran to a nearby bus stop, where she found them crying, and they went back to her flat, where the defendant explained what had happened to the girl's mother.

The girl also said the boy told them that he and Jahziah had struggled, he had tried to twist the knife away from him, and Jahziah had been stabbed in the process.

She said Jahziah allegedly dropped to the floor but got back up. She could not recall what the boy told her about how the second stab wound occurred.

The girl's mother told the defendant that he needed to tell the police what had happened, that it was "self-defence". She gave him £20 for a taxi to the police station but later found out he did not go.

Details of the address where Jahziah was found cannot be published because of a court order.

A man in his 40s, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is also on trial charged with assisting the youth accused of murder to evade police until their arrest three days after the death.

The trial continues.