AN eyewitness who was in Brighton when a man allegedly pushed a young boy 100ft from a clifftop described the defendant as seeming ‘determined’.
Anthony Stocks, of Iceni Close, Goring, is on trial at Oxford Crown Court accused of attempting to murder a 10-year-old boy after he tried to ‘intervene’ with Stocks allegedly assaulting an underage girl.
The boy to stop the alleged assaults, which reportedly took place in the early 2020s, resulting in the 54-year-old allegedly trying to kill the boy on one occasion and contemplating it on a second.
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On September 24, 2022, Stocks took the boy to Ovingdean, Brighton after allegedly thinking about pushing him off a cliff at a quarry in Chinnor several weeks earlier.
An eyewitness was walking along the cliff with his partner prior to the incident and described Stocks as seeming ‘determined’ and ‘not very happy’.
When asked to describe the pair he said, the witness said: “One was a little boy and the other was an older chap.
“[The boy] looked quite exuberant. He looked like an average boy doing average boy things.
"The other man was walking several paces behind, walking very quickly as if to keep up with the boy.
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“He just seemed quote determined and not very happy. He did not seem like a very happy chappy.
“I only saw him for a couple of seconds, he seemed like someone out for a walk but was not in a good mood.”
The witness and his partner then left the clifftop to sit down on the beach when he described seeing ‘two figures’ on the cliff.
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“To my astonishment, we noticed a figure, or two figures, up where they shouldn’t be,” he said.
“On the top of the cliff there is a fence which is quite flimsy and I looked like someone was on the wrong side of it.
“I almost saw something, I can’t quite describe what it was, an object, something fell and then I looked away…I remember hearing a shriek, it was very, very audible.”
The witness and his partner then left the beach, thinking it was ‘kids mucking around’.
However, he said that as they walked along the clifftop, he saw ‘people congregating at the bottom of the cliff’.
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He added: “I carried on walking for a bit and I saw…what I saw and I froze in horror. I found it difficult.
“We bumped into several people but one I believe was the man we saw earlier. I told him, ‘Don’t go that way, there has been an accident’ and he said ‘I know’.”
The trial continues.
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