Diluted blood in kitchen where Oldbury teenager Jahziah Coke found dead ‘suggests clean-up attempts’, court heard

Jahziah Coke was stabbed in the stomach and chest and found dead in the hallway of a house in Oldbury by paramedics responding to a 999 call on the afternoon of August 29 last year.

A boy accused of Jahziah’s murder, and a man in his 40s accused of assisting him to evade police until their arrest three days after Jahziah died, are on trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court – but neither can be named for legal reasons.

A second boy, who is alleged to have fled the scene of the incident along with the defendant and also cannot be named, was charged with murder, but the case against him was dropped before the trial started last week.

The court heard on Wednesday that blood stains found in the property, which cannot be identified due to a court order, after Jahziah was found dead at the bottom of the stairs suggested there may have been an “altercation” upstairs near one of the bedrooms.

Senior forensic scientist Gillian O’Boyle, whose expertise includes bloodstain pattern analysis and scene examinations, said there was blood on a damaged bedroom door that had come off its hinges, on the banister on the landing and down the walls of the stairway.

She said it was “possible” that whatever occurred to result in bleeding had happened in the area of the bedroom doorway.

She said: “In my opinion, the majority, if not all of the blood can be explained by someone or something wet with blood moving around the upstairs landing, just inside the doorway to a rear bedroom, down the stairway and having contact with various surfaces of these areas of the address.”

Mrs O’Boyle also noted how she found blood that was diluted on a chair in the kitchen of the property.

She said one explanation for the presence of diluted blood is that “an attempt at clean-up of something, or someone, wet with blood took place in this area”.

The court was previously told that the defendant and the other boy fled from the scene of the incident over fences before catching a bus to a friend’s house, where they arrived “stressed and sweaty”.

The female friend, who also cannot be named, said the defendant used her phone to look at train tickets to Paris and that he became emotional when she told him that someone had messaged her on Snapchat to say that Jahziah had died.

She told police in a recorded interview that the defendant claimed he and Jahziah had struggled, he had tried to twist the knife away from him and that Jahziah had been stabbed in the process.

She said Jahziah had allegedly dropped to the floor and got back up, but she could not recall what the boy had told her about how the second stab wound occurred.

The trial continues.