A heroic 10-year-old boy who was thrown off a 100ft cliff while trying to save his sister from a rapist in the UK has miraculously survived, a jury has been told.
Anthony Stocks, 54, urged the boy to stop abusing the girl, who he said he planned to marry before she was 13. According to the Brighton Argus.
“The defendant tried to kill him by pushing him off a cliff,” prosecutor Zoe Johnson told Oxford Crown Court, referring to the September 2022 attack on the abused girl’s brother. The London Times said:.
“That afternoon, the boy fell 100 feet from the edge of the cliff onto the concrete beneath the sidewalk below.”
According to Britain’s Times newspaper, a witness recalled seeing “a small object fall, as if it had been thrown off a cliff” in Brighton, while others who rushed to help said the boy was in “horrible condition”. He said it was.
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, suffered injuries to his head, chest, shoulders and kidneys but managed to survive after being placed in a medically induced coma, jurors heard.
Prosecutors said Stock took the boy and his sister to Brighton by train and then took them for a walk on chalk cliffs. It was not immediately clear how he knew his younger siblings.
The man then claimed he “didn’t see” the boy fall and only discovered him at the bottom of the cliff after “hearing a noise”, the Argus newspaper reported.
Witnesses who helped the boy told jurors that Stocks joined them, then sat down, rolled a cigarette and took out his cell phone.
According to one of the people who gave evidence, Stocks allegedly said, “I told him to stay away from the edge.”
But the boy’s sister later told police that Stocks had hinted at plans to kill the boy, and even had planned to push him off a quarry weeks earlier, jurors heard.
“He wanted to get rid of him so we could be together, so [the boy] “You’re not going to get in our way,” the girl said, according to the Argus.
According to an Argus court report, Stocks is accused of “grooming” the girl and even telling her mental health counselor that they would “get married one day” and “then be together forever.”
Stocks is charged with four counts of sexual assault of a child under 13, one count of causing or abetting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, and one count of child rape.
Stock is also charged with one count of attempted murder and one count of cruelty to persons under 16.
He denies all charges.
“I am not sexually attracted to children and have never attempted or incited sexual activity with a child,” Stocks said in a statement.
