Accused ‘lunged’ knife into neck (From Daily Echo)

Accused ‘lunged’ knife into Jamie Dack's neck

3:39pm Wednesday 14th November 2012 in Southampton

A MAN accused of being part of a gang who murdered Jamie Dack told a court he wouldn’t have stabbed him if he’d been medicated for his ADHD.

Lee Nicholls said he wasn’t “using that as an excuse” but added he would have “stepped back” and never have put himself in that situation.

Nicholls, 28, told Winchester Crown Court how he “saw red” when he was told Jamie, pictured, was a “nonce”, slang for a child sex offender.

He told jurors how on Good Friday he stabbed Jamie in the leg with a kitchen knife.

But two of his co-accused, Andrew Dwyer-Skeats and Ryan Woodmansey, then took the knife, taking it in turns to stab him eight times.

Stood in the kitchen of the flat in Bevois Mews, Nicholls said there was “an expectation”

on him to join in so he took the weapon and “lunged” at him, stabbing him once in the neck.

He told jurors: “I feared for my life, I had just seen them stab Jamie a number of times and I just feared for my safety, that they would turn on me if I didn’t help.”

Nicholls described how he dropped the knife after that and went to the bedroom, hearing Jamie screaming and begging them to stop.

He said: “I knew they wanted me to kill him and that was not my intention.”

Nicholls told how afterwards he was told by Dwyer-Skeats “you killed him”

and he believed he had because Jamie was bleeding heavily from the neck.

He checked for a pulse but didn’t call an ambulance, telling the court: “I only wish I had”.

Nicholls said his reported confession to police following his arrest, in which he admitted stabbing Jamie repeatedly, had been “mostly lies”.

Nicholls, of Southampton Street, Dwyer-Skeats, 26, and Donna Chalk, 21, both of Bevois Mews, and Woodmansey, 32, of no fixed address, deny murder.

All admit perverting the course of justice.

Proceeding