By Rebecca Peppiatt
A young mother allegedly washed blood from a large kitchen knife and cut carrots while her partner lay dying from a stab wound a few metres away, a Perth court has been told.
Claudia Maria Federico has pleaded not guilty to the manslaughter of Joseph Nicoli last March after a heated argument at their West Perth home turned deadly.
Claudia Maria Federico is facing manslaughter charges over the stabbing death of her partner.Credit: Facebook
Prosecutors opened Federico’s trial in the Supreme Court of WA on Monday by telling the court the couple – who shared a one-month-old baby and custody of Federico’s nine-year-old daughter from a previous relationship – had both been high on methamphetamine on the morning of March 4, 2023.
While there is no suggestion Federico killed her partner on purpose, the circumstances surrounding the moments before and after his death are debated.
Justin Whalley, SC, told the jury an argument over text messages turned into a face-to-face altercation on the stairs of the couple’s home, which Federico “brought a knife to”.
“There was some side-to-side movement on the stairs,” Whalley told the jury.
“She was pointing the knife at Mr Nicoli. He said, ‘Don’t do it Claudia’, and she said words to the effect of, ‘Don’t mess with me’.”
Nicoli died after the 19-centimetre kitchen knife severed a major artery in his leg.
Whether Nicoli was killed accidentally in the heat of the argument or stabbed after an innocent “collision” on the stairwell will be the subject of the eight-day trial.
Prosecutors claim Federico took the knife to the stairs intending to threaten Nicoli and, after a struggle, he was accidently stabbed on the top of his right thigh.
Whalley told the jury Federico then left Nicoli, who was bleeding heavily on the stairs and drifting into unconsciousness, to wash the knife in the kitchen sink and then began cutting carrots.
Whalley alleged Federico then waited before calling triple zero to help her partner, who died six days later from irreversible brain damage due to the blood loss.
“The state’s case is that the only reasonable explanation for that conduct (cutting the carrots) was that the accused was going to have to explain why she had a knife in her hand,” Whalley told the court.
“She had to explain why she had a knife in her hand when they met up on the stairs.
“Anyone who had been using a knife for culinary purposes would have left it on the worktop before going to do something else in the house.”
But Federico’s defence lawyer Jonathan Davies told the court the argument between his client and Nicoli had died down by the time she began to cut carrots, and a “loud noise” from upstairs caused her to run from the kitchen, knife in hand, and up the stairs to see what was going on.
“She ascends the staircase and collides with Nicoli as he was coming down,” Davies told the jury.
“He was in excess of 100 kilograms and was somewhat clumsy. That collision caused the knife to penetrate towards the top of his right thigh.”
Federico’s young daughter, who watched the incident unfold from the doorway of her bedroom, gave evidence to police that her mother had “pretended to cut carrots” in the wake of the incident and that she told police she was cutting them for her daughter. But the child told police that she “didn’t even like carrots”.
She also told officers her mother had told her to say that “Joe ran into the knife”, adding, “but I said that’s not what happened”.
“I didn’t see mum put the knife in him,” she said to police in a pre-recorded interview that was played to the court.
“Joe said, ‘look what you did to me’ and then he passed out.”
The now 10-year-old said that after Nicoli fell to the floor, he started making “snoring sounds” and that Federico started saying “oh my God, oh my God”.
The girl testified that she was screaming from the top of the stairs as Nicoli was bleeding and that her mother helped her climb off the side of the stair well so she didn’t have to walk through the blood.
She then said she was instructed to take her baby brother outside while her mother was on the phone to paramedics.
The trial continues.
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