Schoolboy ‘tried to beat sleeping students to death with a hammer’, court told
A public schoolboy was “on a mission” to protect himself from a “zombie apocalypse” when he tried to kill two sleeping students by attacking them with a claw hammer, a court has been told.
The 17-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is also accused of repeatedly striking a teacher in the skull with a hammer after attacking the boys at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon.
The teenager was 16 when the attacks took place and claims he was sleepwalking at the time.
The schoolboy was wearing just his boxer shorts and had armed himself with four claw hammers and waited for the boys to fall asleep before allegedly attacking them, Exeter Crown Court heard.
James Dawes KC, prosecuting, said the two boys were in cabin-style beds in one of the mixed school’s boarding houses when the defendant climbed up and hit them with at least one hammer shortly before 1am on 9 June last year.
“The defendant was awake, and he decided to put into action a plan that he had been fermenting in his head for some time,” Mr Dawes said.
“And that plan was to kill the two boys, and he decided to do it whilst they slept in their own beds, and he decided to do it with a hammer.
‘He smashed a hammer into their heads as they slept’
Mr Dawes added: “The defendant was in possession of four claw hammers – a heavy hammer with a flat striking side and two-pronged claw at the back.
“He had four of them and he selected more than one hammer and he quietly climbed up into the top of the first cabin bed.
“The boys are asleep, and they had both had their heads on pillows, and then he smashed a hammer or hammers into their heads as they slept, multiple times.
“He also hit arms and backs. He didn’t just use the flat end of the hammer – he used the claw end as well to strike these boys.
“These blows smashed their skulls.”
Henry Roffe-Silvester, a teacher who was asleep in his own quarters, was awoken by noises coming from the boarding house and went to investigate, the court heard.
When he entered the bedroom where the attack had happened, he saw a silhouetted figure standing in the room who turned towards him and repeatedly struck him over the head with a hammer.
Another student heard Mr Roffe-Silvester’s shouts and swearing as he fled the bedroom and dialled 999 – believing there was an intruder.
“Mr Roffe-Silvester retreated down the corridor, with the defendant attacking him again and again with the hammer around his face and head,” Mr Dawes said.
“He was shouting at the defendant to stop. In total there were six impacts to his head.
“He said the defendant was expressionless, he was neutral and unsettling in his expression and appearance.
“Mr Roffe-Silvester said he thought the defendant appeared to be ‘on a mission’ and afterwards his face and body relaxed, and he was calm and slumped on his feet, squatting against the wall.”
Another student was told to “keep an eye” on the defendant in the matron’s office, Mr Dawes said.
“The defendant told him he was feeling quite stressed about things before the incident with school tests and owed some money to a girl,” he said.
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A police cordon was put in place at the school after the attacks
Mr Dawes said the defendant told the student he had fallen asleep after watching a movie and then carried out the attack.
The prosecutor suggested this was a lie because there was evidence that the boy was using his iPad until moments before the alleged assaults.
“The student tried to calm the defendant down and asked him again what had happened, and the defendant said to the student he was watching horror movies and he had weapons to prepare for the zombie apocalypse and to protect himself,” Mr Dawes said.
One student heard the defendant say: “I am sorry, I was dreaming.”
And another told police the teenager said: “I am going to prison, I was sleepwalking.”
‘It was like a scene from a horror film’
Paramedics who arrived at the school described the scene they found, with one saying the bedroom was “the worst scene he had ever encountered in 20 years in emergency care”.
A colleague said: “I have served in Iraq and had never seen such a scene of carnage, with blood over the desks, over the walls and the beds.”
Another said: “It was like a scene from a horror film. The boys were making a deal of noise and it was clear to him they were fighting for their lives.”
The defendant denies three charges of attempted murder.
The trial was adjourned until Monday.
Ramesh lives in fear every day. A police siren is enough to alarm him.
He’s one of up to 400,000 visa overstayers in the UK, one lawyer we spoke to believes.
It’s only an estimate because the Home Office has stopped collecting figures – which were unreliable in the first place.
Britain is being laughed at, one man told us, “because they know it’s a soft country”.
‘Ramesh’ came to the UK from India
We meet Ramesh (not his real name) at a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, where he goes for food and support.
He insists he can’t return to India where he claims he was involved in political activism.
Ramesh says he came to the UK on a student visa in 2023, but it was cancelled when he failed to continue his studies after being involved in a serious accident.
He tells us he is doing cash-in-hand work for people who he knows through the community where he is living and is currently working on a house extension where he gets paid as little as £50 for nine hours labouring.
“It’s very difficult for me to live in the UK without my Indian or Pakistani community – also because there are a lot of Pakistani people who give me work in their houses for cleaning and for household things,” he adds.
‘What will become of people like us?’
Anike has lived in limbo for 12 years.
Now living in Greater Manchester, she came to the UK from Nigeria when her sister Esther was diagnosed with a brain tumour – she had a multi-entry visa but was supposed to leave after three months.
Esther had serious complications from brain surgery and says she is reliant on her sister for care.
Immigration officials are in touch with her because she has to digitally sign in every month.
Anike has had seven failed applications for leave to remain on compassionate grounds refused but is now desperate to have her status settled – afraid of the shifting public mood over migration.
“Everybody is thinking ‘what will become of people like us?'” she adds.
‘It’s a shambles’
The government can’t say with any degree of accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
But piecing together multiple accounts from community leaders and lawyers the picture we’ve built is stark.
Immigration lawyer Harjap Singh Bhangal told us he believed there could be several hundred thousand visa overstayers currently in Britain.
He says: “At this time, there’s definitely in excess of about 200,000 people overstaying in the UK. It might even be closer to 300,000, it could even be 400,000.”
Asked what evidence he has for this he replies: “Every day I see at least one overstayer, any immigration lawyers like me see overstayers and that is the bulk of the work for immigration lawyers.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked.”
The number of those who are overstaying visas and working cash in hand is also virtually impossible to measure.
‘They know Britain is a soft country’
“They’re laughing at us because they know Britain is a soft country, where you won’t be picked up easily,” says the local man we’ve arranged to meet as part of our investigation.
We’re in Kingsbury in northwest London – an area which people say has been transformed over the past five years as post-Brexit visa opportunities opened up for people coming from South Asia.
‘Mini-Mumbai’
The man we’re talking to lives in the community and helps with events here. He doesn’t want to be identified but raises serious questions about visa abuse.
“Since the last five years, a huge amount of people have come in this country on this visiting visa, and they come with one thing in mind – to overstay and work in cash,” he says.
“This area is easy to live in because they know they can survive. It looks like as if you are walking through mini-Mumbai.”
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‘The system is more than broken’
‘It’s taxpayers who are paying’
And he claims economic migrants are regularly arriving – who’ve paid strangers to pretend they’re a friend or relative in order to obtain a visitor visa to get to Britain.
He says: “I’ve come across so many people who have come this way into this country. It’s widespread. When I talk to these people, they literally tell me, ‘Oh, someone is coming tomorrow, day after tomorrow, someone is coming’.
“Because they’re hidden they may not be claiming benefits, but they can access emergency healthcare and their children can go to school.
“And who is paying for it? It’s the taxpayers who are paying for all this,” says the man we’ve met in north London.
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A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will not tolerate any abuse of our immigration system and anyone found to be breaking the rules will be liable to have enforcement action taken against them.
“In the first year of this government, we have returned 35,000 people with no right to be here – a 13% rise compared to the previous year.
“Arrests and raids for illegal working have soared to their highest levels since records began, up 63% and 51%.”
The government can’t say with accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
Sky News has spoken to immigration lawyers about the numbers, and one believes there could be as many as 400,000 living across the country.
Harjap Singh Bhangal described the situation as a “shambles”.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked,” he told Sky’s Lisa Holland.
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The visa overstayers in ‘soft’ Britain
Why doesn’t the government know?
The Home Office used to gather data on visa overstayers by effectively checking a list of passport numbers associated with visas against a list of passport numbers of people leaving the UK, taken from airlines and other international travel providers.
If there was a passport number match in the arrivals and departures part of their database, that person was recorded to have left when they should have. If there wasn’t, they were a potential overstayer.
They stopped producing the figures because a combination of Brexit and COVID added complications that made the Home Office conclude they wouldn’t be able to get to a reliable number using the same method.
It’s now four and a half years since EU citizens had freedom of movement to the UK revoked, and more than three and a half years since pandemic-era travel restrictions ended.
And yet we are still waiting to see what a new method might look like.
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The old method wasn’t perfect. If someone changed their passport while in the UK, for example, or if the airline or individual entered the number wrong when they were leaving, there wouldn’t be a match.
The Home Office regarded the statistics as likely overestimating the true number of overstayers, and the Office for National Statistics designated the figures as “experimental” rather than “official” statistics, meaning the conclusions should be treated with caution. But they were a reasonable best guess.
With all that in mind, between April 2016 and March 2020 upwards of 250,000 people were flagged as potential overstayers, equivalent to 63,000 per year.
That’s more than the 190,000 people who are recorded to have arrived in the UK on small boats since 2018.
It represents 3.5% of the seven million visas that expired over that period, so at least 96.5% of people left when they should.
Other Home Office data reveals that more than 13 million visas were issued between 2020 and the end of June 2025, including a record 3.4 million in 2023.
But what we don’t know is how many have expired, which means it’s difficult for us to even guess how many people might have overstayed.
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