Weston skatepark murder trial hears machete-wielding boy 'bolted' as 'cowards' laughed

The boy, who has since come of age, gave his account of the incident during two police interviews, which were played for an ACT Supreme Court jury when he gave evidence on Wednesday and Thursday.

A different boy, now 17, is standing trial in that court for murder after denying responsibility for the death of an 18-year-old man, who was stabbed six times during the Weston Creek skatepark fight.

The accused does, however, admit having recklessly inflicted grievous bodily harm by stabbing the deceased's 16-year-old cousin in the back in the midst of the same two-minute melee.

The people involved in the incident cannot be named for legal reasons.

During his first police interview, conducted within three hours of the September 2020 fight, the boy who gave evidence on Wednesday and Thursday said nothing about a machete.

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When he went back to speak to investigators two days later, he described travelling to the skatepark with three others, including the two cousins, after a Snapchat argument resulted in plans for a fight.

The boy said the quartet arrived to "a set-up", which involved a greater number of people from two other vehicles effectively ambushing the car he was in and dragging the cousins out of the front seats.

He described hitting someone with a machete, previously described as being plastic and not necessarily sharp enough to even cut paper, in an effort to stop people "laying into" the younger cousin.

The boy told police he also yelled "at the top of my lungs" and waved the machete around as he pleaded with the people from the opposing side of the conflict to stop.

"Everyone, I have a machete. Just stop. Please stop," he claimed to have bellowed.

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The boy called the people on the other side of the fight "cowards", and said they may not have initially realised there were passengers in the back of the cousins' car because his yelling had surprised them.

He said they had looked at him as if to say: "Who is this guy? Where did he come from?"

The boy said one of the brawlers responded to his shouting by producing a pickaxe, so he "bolted".

As he ran away, he said, he could hear people "just laughing" as they smashed up the car his group had arrived in.

"It was just ha-ha-ha, you know, 'sucked in' kind of laugh," he told police.

The boy said after he later returned to find the 18-year-old cousin dead, he called triple-0 and hid the machete in a stormwater drain because he "wasn't thinking".

Under cross-examination on Thursday, he denied waving or holding the machete in anyone's face, making threats to kill, and numerous other propositions put to him by defence barrister David Barrow.

The trial, before Chief Justice Lucy McCallum and a jury that now has 13 members, continues.

There were originally 16 jurors but three have been discharged since the trial began last week, with the latest to leave being let go on Wednesday morning after testing positive for COVID-19.

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