A 10-year-old girl who was attacked and taken advantage of a 16-year-old boy pretended to be lifeless to stop the attack.
The teen, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is accused of five offenses linked to the incident in Devon.
Now 17 years old, the defendant admitted to choking and assaulting the young girl. However, he denied attempted rape, murder, and attempting to choke with the intention to commit rape.
Bristol Crown Court heard the 10-year-old was chocked until she fell unconscious before she was attacked.
Anna Vigars QC, prosecuting, said to the court: “She thought she was going to die. She thought a way to avoid the whole thing was to pretend that she was already dead. She flopped down and shut her eyes.
“She hoped that whoever it was who had hold of her neck might just give up and leave her.
“When she pretended that was what was happening to her, she did fade away. She can remember nothing from that point until she came to in the stream.”
Mrs. Vigars also said the girl had been grabbed before she was pulled down towards the stream.
“Although she never saw his face, the defendant was the person who grabbed her from behind,” she told the jury.
“We know that because he accepts that it was him. He took hold of her from behind, around her throat, wrapping his arm around her neck and squeezing hard.
“By accident, she held down the home button on her phone – that activated Siri. That drew his attention to the mobile phone.
“He took it out of her hands and threw it away from her, into the bushes.
“She had seen some self-defense videos so she tried to do what she saw on those videos, which was to kick her attacker in the groin, but because he was holding her so tightly she couldn’t move sufficiently to get a good kick in.”
The girl described how she was ‘fading into a sleep’ as she sat down in the water. “I heard someone coming up behind me, they grabbed me.
“Then that person grabbed my phone and he chucked it. Then he started strangling me and pulled me down to the river.
“At that point, I started to panic. I tried kicking him in his privates because when I was younger on a video I was watching it came up with self-defence.
“As he was holding me so tightly, I couldn’t move. He was pulling me down to where the river was.”
She added: “He was getting tighter and tighter and then I woke up on my own in the river.”
The trial is still ongoing.
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