A PUPIL who attacked two roommates with hammers in the middle of the night at a Devon boarding school may have been sleepwalking, Ted Davenport reports.

The 17-year-old caused serious head injuries to the two boys aged 15 and 16 by smashing their skulls in an attack shortly before 1 am on June 9 last year before attacking his housemaster when he went to investigate.

A jury at Exeter Crown Court has been told that the boy caused the injuries during the attack at Blundell’s School in Tiverton but that his defence is that he was asleep when he did so.

The two boys suffered life-threatening injuries including multiple fractures to their skulls and were saved by the first aid given by a fellow pupil at the scene and the skills of surgeons who carried out emergency operations at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton.

The defendant, who was 16 at the time, denies attempting to murder the boys, and his housemaster Mr Henry Roffe-Silvester.

Mr James Dawes, prosecuting, finished his opening speech by telling the jury they could be sure that the boy intended to kill the three victims.

He said: “He had an obsession with one of the other boys, an obsession with hammers, an obsession with killing and killers, and an obsession with killing children.

“It may not be palatable or particularly logical but it appears to be an obsession which he carried out.

“The blood distribution evidence is consistent with him using more than one hammer.

“You may think that to get up to the top of the two cabin beds to get the height to strike the blows to get the necessary power. This was a deliberate action.

“He rained blows down on their unprotected sleeping heads with heavy hammers.

“He used both sides of the hammers including the sharp claw. He had purchased these hammers months in advance.”

Mr Kerim Fuad, KC, made an opening statement on behalf of the defence and said his client does not deny wielding the hammer or causing the injuries but had no intention of carrying out the attacks.

He said: “He was only 16 years old at the time. The defence case is that the other two boys were his friends and dorm mates and he had no reason or intention to kill them, so why?

“The defence case is that he can only have been consumed in an episode of sleepwalking to have carried out these extraordinary acts. He was not conscious or awake when he did them.

“It is not an issue that he took a hammer or hammers to the other boys and Mr Roffe-Silvester and not an issue that he caused these awful, awful injuries.

“Nothing can diminish that and we do not at any stage seek to minimise the horror of the incident or what those boarders went through.

“What is in issue is what caused him to smash their heads in such a horror film way.

“Was he awake and intended to kill them or may he have been sleepwalking and therefore not functioning.

“He could never have hoped to get away with it. If you are asleep, you cannot be responsible. You will hear about the science of sleepwalking from experts.”

Mr Fuad said the boy was also under stress because he was being blackmailed by an internet fraudster using the name Layla who had demanded £400 three days before the attacks.

The jury has been playing a recording of a police interview carried out with the first of the two victims two months after the hammer attack.

He said he had been a close friend of the defendant until an incident the previous September in which he accused him falsely of laughing at him in class.

He said the defendant then tried to disrupt his work by stapling his homework to his desk or smashing his property with hammers. He said his last memory of the night was brushing his teeth before bed.

The trial continues.