A gypsy who beat his cousin to death with a large steel plasterer’s whisk at a service station has insisted that he was trying to resolve a blood feud between them.
Simon Baker, 22, and Mikey Coyle, 21, confronted Quhey Saunders in a shop at Cobham Services on the M25 after an ongoing dispute between family members.
Mr Saunders, 20, had been to a weekend-long wedding party and he and his friends had stopped off to buy more alcohol from the shop.
After a scuffle outside, the court heard that Coyle grabbed a shovel and Baker picked up the steel whisk from their van, which was parked outside.
Traveller Quhey Saunders (pictured) was battered to death with a plasterer’s whisk and a shovel during a brawl with two other travellers at an M25 service station, a court heard today
Police and a member of the public battled to save him but sadly he died
They followed Saunders back into the shop and Baker is accused of smashing him over the head with the whisk.
He was airlifted to hospital but the edge of the whisk had penetrated his brain and caused a three inch gash and he died three days later.
Roofer Baker, who is one of six children, told the court he had stopped off at the services with his first cousin Coyle, who he was helping with a job in Epsom.
They were pulling away after buying petrol and doughnuts when he saw the victim in his car with his friends and decided to confront him.
Baker told the court that his associates had told him Saunders, who was a second cousin, had been threatening to ‘give him a good hiding.’
‘There was an ongoing threat. I had been barred from traveller events,’ Baker told the jury.
Ms Smith posted a heartbreaking tribute to him on Facebook after he was pronounced dead
‘I don’t want anything like that. I don’t want to be getting in any problems with anyone. I live a quiet happy lifestyle.’
He said when he saw Saunders in the blue Ford Focus he told Coyle to stop the van so he could speak to him.
‘I wanted to clear the air. I just wanted to talk about it,’ he told the jury. ‘I never went in there thinking I was going to have a fight.’
He said he spoke to Saunders in the shop and the victim admitted he had said he was going to give Baker a ‘good hiding.’
But Baker said there was no problem until Saunders’ friend Lizzie Connors became involved in the argument
‘I got the impression she had been drinking. She started shouting and blew it out of all proportion,’ he said. ‘She started pushing me. She was calling me names.
‘If she has never done nothing I think me and Quhey would have just talked,’ he said.
Mr Saunders (pictured) died three days later and a post mortem found he died from a head injury caused by a wound which entered the left side of his head and through a thick part of his skull, and 10cm through both sides of the brain
At one stage Saunders pushed Mrs Connors away and he and Baker continued their discussion outside the shop.
They scuffled near the van and Baker said: ‘Me and Quhey had a bit of a wrestle. I was trying to restrain him.
‘I just wanted to jump in the van and get out of there. It had all gone too far.
‘I didn’t want to engage with Quhey at all.’
He said Saunders repeatedly threatened to kill him, taunting: ‘You won’t be sleeping tonight.’
Baker said at one stage he managed to get into the van but Saunders and his friends were banging on the roof.
He got out of the van but said it was because he did not want Saunders on top of him in the seats.
Baker added: ‘He would have given me a bad beating in there. I didn’t want a fight that day. I didn’t want to fight anyone. My intention was to jump in the van and go home.’
Mr Saunders (left and right) was travelling home with his friend Marian Barbu and his uncle and aunt Patrick and Lizzy Connor a day after a family wedding in Wales when they made the ‘fateful and tragic’ decision to pull over, jurors heard
He said he then saw Coyle get the shovel from the van and he decided to try and use the whisk so he could leave.
‘I wanted them to keep their distance I thought, they are not stopping, they are not scared of us or anything, they want to beat us up.
‘I grabbed the whisk in the hope that it would have scared them and warded them off.
‘I think it just wound Quhey up. I had tried to get in the van two or three times and go. But they wouldn’t let me go.
‘I tried quite a few times to go back to the vehicle. They always stopped us from getting in.
‘I had the whisk in my hand. I was telling him back off, to leave me alone. It made him more angry and wound him up more. I was scared for my life.’
Baker, of Redhill, Surrey, and Coyle, of Kingston, Surrey, both deny murder.
They claim Mr Saunders was the aggressor and he was killed when they acted in self-defence.
The trial continues.
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