UNITED KINGDOM - A teacher in the United Kingdom was stabbed in the head by a 15-year-old student in an unprovoked classroom attack after the boy asked her for help.
The teacher, Vicki Williams, is now speaking out after the horrific attack. On Thursday, September 3, Williams and the now-16-year-old male student who stabbed her in a classroom at Milford Haven Comprehensive School on February 5 of this year both appeared in Swansea Crown Court, PEOPLE reported.
The teen, whose identity is being withheld due to his status as a minor, was found not guilty of attempted murder but convicted of wounding with intent and unlawful wounding in July. During sentencing on Thursday, he was handed a four-and-a-half-year sentence.
In her victim impact statement, Williams told the court that she felt "sadness, anger and guilt" after the incident. She also stated that she is set to start therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder this week.
"Sadness is the most predominant, I focus too much on what could have happened to me,” she said. “I’m in disbelief about what’s happened." Williams also told the court that at one point, she was afraid that her daughter had "almost been left without a mum."
Williams, a history teacher, previously testified that she thought she was going to die during the early February attack, describing the look on her student's face as one of "pure hatred" and saying the assault "came out of nowhere." During a prior court appearance, Williams said the student, who was 15 at the time, followed her into her empty classroom after asking for help with his history assignment.
She became suspicious when he closed the door behind him, blaming it on the temperature. "I ask him again, ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ And then he pulls [the knife] out of the bag and lunges at me,” she told the court. The teen, however, disputed the teacher's claims in court, saying that the assault was an accident and that Williams "tried to grab" the knife.
Another teacher heard Williams calling for help and rushed over. CCTV captured the teen rushing away from the classroom immediately afterward. The student also claimed to have only brought the knife to school to play a game with his friends, with the goal being to see who could sneak the most ridiculous item onto campus.
During the sentencing hearing on Thursday, Williams questioned how she could continue working after the attack. "My fellow teachers and I don’t deserve this because we work so hard. I didn’t ask for this. Leaving teaching should have been my choice to make,” she said.
Judge Paul Thomas said he didn't "know for certain" what caused the teen to attack Williams. "What I do know for certain is that you took a knife that day to school because you wanted to really hurt her with it,” he said of the “bigger and stronger” teen. “It was pure luck that she didn’t have far worse injuries, even fatal injuries."
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