Public schoolboy who tried to kill classmates and teacher with hammers named
A public schoolboy who tried to murder two fellow students as they slept before turning on a teacher has been named for the first time.
Thomas Wei Huang, now 17, armed himself with three claw hammers and ambushed the boys in their boarding house at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon, in June last year.
He previously could not be identified due to a legal order, but it was lifted by a judge today.
Wearing just his boxer shorts, Huang waited for the boys to fall asleep in their cabin-style beds before climbing up and attacking them.
Henry Roffe-Silvester, their house master, was sleeping in his nearby quarters and went to investigate after noises from the boarding house woke him up.
He later told a jury he entered the bedroom to the sight of a silhouetted figure who turned towards him and repeatedly struck him in the head.
Another student who heard the house master shouting and swearing as he fled called 999, believing there was an intruder.
The boys suffered skull fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding and injuries to their ribs and spleen.
They had no memory of the incident but are now living with ‘long-term consequences’, with one of the boys suffering permanent brain damage.
Mr Roffe-Silvester was struck six time in total but has made a full recovery.
Huang insisted he was sleepwalking the whole time, and therefore was not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.
‘I feel very terribly sorry for all three individuals because of what I did to them,’ he said while giving evidence.
He insisted he kept the hammers by his bed ‘for protection’ from a potential ‘zombie apocalypse’.
But the court heard how investigators ‘uncovered an obsession that the defendant had with one of the boys, an obsession with hammers as weapons, and an obsession with killing and killers and the killing of children’.
Kerim Fuad KC, defending, described the incident as a ‘tragic and extraordinary case’ and said Huang had since been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
The teenager struggled from academic and personal difficulties and had an ‘unhealthy interest in violence and violent films’, Mr Fuad added.
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