Harvey Willgoose trial: deputy headteacher describes moment he found killer with knife
A teenage boy accused of murdering a schoolmate repeatedly said ‘you know I can’t control it’ as he was asked to drop the knife he was holding after carrying out the fatal stabbing.
15-year-old Harvey Willgoose was stabbed in the heart during an incident in the courtyard at All Saints School a few minutes after the lunchtime break began on February 3, 2025.
He collapsed less than a minute later, and died a short time later.
Assistant headteacher Morgan Davis was among the members of staff who witnessed the aftermath of the stabbing.
He described seeing the boy accused of Harvey’s murder ‘holding a knife’ and ‘waving it around’ in his interview with police on the day of the fatal incident, a video of which was played to the jury yesterday (July 9).
Mr Davis described how two of his colleagues were already speaking with the defendant, asking him to drop the knife.
“I put my hands out and said: ‘Just give me the knife, just give me the knife’. I kept repeating that in a calm tone.
“At that point he said: ‘You know I can’t control it’ - or words to that effect,” Mr Davis told police.
He said the defendant - a pupil at the school who cannot be named for legal reasons - had moved over to an area of the school with benches in it, and was still holding the knife.
“He was holding it upright, and then on the side as well.
“He looked a bit scared and shocked.
“He kept repeating: ‘you know I can’t control it’.”
Mr Davis said that both he and his two colleagues kept asking the defendant to hand over the knife.
“I asked him a few times in a calm manner to give me the knife, and that’s when I put my hand out,” said Mr Davis.
He continued: “He [the defendant] did give it to me, he didn’t refuse, but still had a grip on it when I took it from him.”
The defendant was subsequently taken to the office of headteacher Sean Pender using a private staff corridor, and Mr Davis stowed the knife in a separate office in the school before it was handed over to police in evidence, jurors have heard.
Mr Davis went on to tell detectives that he believed the defendant’s comments about ‘not being able to control it’ referred to previous incidents of violence the teen had been involved in.
They included one in which he punched a computer monitor in response to a teacher giving him detention, and another in which he punched a partition wall in response to another boy using a racial slur against him.
Mr Davis said the defendant had acknowledged that he sometimes ‘just gets angry’.
The school, said Mr Davis, had attempted to help the defendant ‘work on his anger’ and had put an ‘anger intervention in place’.
During the course of his initial interview, Mr Davis also told police he witnessed an interaction between the defendant and Harvey in the hours before the stabbing but said he did not observe any issue or tension between the boys.
He said the defendant was in the process of filling out a statement concerning a lockdown incident at the school the previous week at that point. Jurors have previously heard how the the defendant was on the periphery of the incident, which resulted in a lockdown after the defendant claimed one of the pupils involved, Boy A, had a knife. No such weapon was ever recovered.
Mr Davis said he asked the defendant on the morning of the stabbing if he had ‘brought anything in’.
The defendant replied, said Mr Davis, by saying: ‘No, no, no, no, nothing like that’. The defendant had not been at school since the lockdown incident, and followed up his denials by saying he was ‘just happy to be back in school’.
Mr Davis is set to give live evidence to jurors today (Thursday, July 10, 2025).
The defendant has admitted carrying out the stabbing, and to Harvey’s manslaughter.
He denies murder, however, and has been on trial at Sheffield Crown Court since Tuesday, July 1, 2025.
The trial, which is expected to take around four weeks, continues.