Shannon Morrison: Cameron Park stabbing trial begins
A teen has told how a former university academic went on a stabbing rampage in a north shore park. Speaking on the first day of the man’s trial he told of the blood-soaked scene of devastation and of his efforts to tend to his friends’ horrific wounds.
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A teenager has told a court of the horrific bloodbath in a north shore park after a former university academic went on a frenzied stabbing attack.
Former UNSW School of Medicine academic Shannon Brett Morrison stabbed six teens – between 15 and 19 – with a flick knife in Turramurra on January 12, 2019.
One of those he stabbed told the court how he held a T-shirt to his friend’s neck as he bled out.
He also rolled up his sleeves in court to show the jury his own two slash scars.
Morrison will not deny he stabbed the victims in Cameron Park.
But his lawyer Phillip Boulten told the court he is not guilty of any of the crimes he committed late on that summer night last year due to psychotic mental illness tinged with paranoid delusions.
He has pleaded not guilty to 15 charges including five counts of wound person with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and two counts of cause wounding or grievous bodily harm to a person with intent to murder.
He is also charged with using a prohibited weapon without a permit which relates to the knife he was allegedly wielding, as well as assault occasioning actual bodily harm, two counts of reckless grievous bodily harm and four counts of reckless wounding.
The teen victim, who was the first to take the witness stand said he had travelled from Hornsby to Turrumurra with his siblings and some friends on Saturday afternoon to meet others at Cameron Park.
They hung out, drunk booze and were “mucking around” for quite some time.
Mr Boulten said Morrison had shared three bottles of wine at a restaurant across the road and had ventured into the park to use the toilet.
The court heard later in the night, Morrison was “hovering” around and making the girls in the group feel uncomfortable.
In a police interview the next day, the teen witness said: “He was by himself just hovering around the park and I was like, yeah, this isn’t right, let’s go.”
At some time before the attack the witness said to Mr Morrison: “Mate, why are you looking at my sister like that?”
After 11pm, the witness and five to ten friends were heading out of the park to go home, he said.
Morrison came up behind them, the court heard, and pushed one of the group down some stairs.
The teen said he pushed Morrison back before the man pulled out a knife and slashed him in his right arm.
Being in shock, he didn’t see the knife come at him a second time and slash his arm again, he said.
It was “all a bit of blur”, he told the court, but he remembers saying something like “oh my god, I’ve been stabbed”.
When he realised what had happened, he looked up and saw another friend in the distance “covered in blood”, he told the court, before running over to help him.
They walked down to the bathrooms and he wrapped his friend’s wound in a T-shirt.
He then looked around and saw Morrison standing in a concrete area at the top of the park, he told the court, and moved towards him.
“(I) tried to restrain him from going anywhere else … (after) seeing how casually the man was walking away after doing what he had done to me.”
He then noticed another friend sitting nearby, wounded.
“I ran to see if he was OK … put a T-shirt on his neck because blood was rushing out of his neck.”
The police soon arrived and evacuated the park.
Mr Boulten, speaking to the jury, said Morrison was in a “highly disturbed mental state” and “very paranoid” at the time.
The actions of the other people in the park, would have triggered his actions, the court was told.
Mr Boulten suggested to the witness that, earlier in the night, his friends had verbally abused another man eating pizza alone in the park.
Mr Bolton told the jury in his opening remarks that to convict Morrison they would need to come to the conclusion, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he had a “specific intention … to cause grievous bodily harm” and thought “I’m going to cause very serious harm to this man”.
“Because of his mental illness and state of intoxication, he’s unlikely to have had the refined process of thinking to say, ‘I’m going to stab this person to cause him very serious harm’,” Mr Boulten said.
“He lashed out because he thought he needed to do what he was doing.”
Mr Morrison spent six months behind bars before being bailed on strict conditions, including a $900,000 surety put up by a supporter.
The trial continues