Albion Park scooter bashing accused told police 'I'm a piece of s-it': court

After landing the near-fatal blow and fleeing, the teen's girlfriend encouraged him to return to the alleyway crime scene and check on his unconscious victim because "what if he’s dead?”. 

To the sounds of approaching sirens, he stepped onto the gold-coloured scooter he had moments earlier brandished as a weapon and returned to the injured teen, only to find "I couldn't look at him". 

“I felt bad,” the teen, who cannot be publicly identified, told police in a recorded interview played to a jury at Wollongong District Court on Wednesday.

“I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think it would do so much damage.”

Read more: Scooter attack victim gives evidence in attacker’s trial

The teen's legal team is relying on the interview to show that, while he admittedly struck his adversary, he did not intend to cause him such serious injuries. 

Both aged 16, the accused teen and the victim were each accompanied by a friend as they crossed paths in an alleyway in suburban Albion Park the afternoon off April 8 last year. 

The court heard the accused teen's friend, two years younger than the others, had a pre-existing quarrel with the victim’s friend, and “had a go” at him when he saw the pair up ahead. 

He admitted he began the altercation by kicking the victim’s friend as he rode past on his scooter. 

He described his younger friend’s repeated physical efforts to engage the other party in a fight once the four teens were in the alleyway. 

He said the victim repeatedly attempted to end the conflict but then, “stepped in and put it all over [the younger teen]”.

“[He was] smashing him, punching him, throwing him around … and then punched him straight in the sternum and then I heard a ‘urrhhh’ [from the younger teen] and I just thought, nup,” he said. “And I just thought it wasn’t fair, a 14 [versus] a 16-year-old and you know, I swung the scooter.” 

He said the victim was standing over the younger teen, saying “are you done, are you done?” when he then intervened. “That’s when I said, ‘are you done?’ and swung the scooter.”  

He described how he held the scooter by the handlebar, then swung it overhead with one hand so the deck rotated over the handlebars. 

He said a metal component connected with the teen’s head and “I just seen him drop”, with his head then hitting the concrete. 

He said the injured teen was getting up when he returned to the alleyway to check on him, but he later learned via Facebook that he was in a critical condition in hospital. 

Asked what the purpose of swinging the scooter had been, he told police, “there was no purpose. Spur of the moment thing. I didn’t mean to attack him”.  The trial continues Thursday.