A FATHER told today how he tried to save the life of stabbed teenager Jay Kensett before paramedics arrived.

Ernest Taylor, of Whitehawk Way, Brighton, rushed out of his house after hearing a commotion late in the evening of March 26 last year.

He found a group of youths shouting that one of their friends had been stabbed.

Mr Taylor told Lewes Crown Court: "At first I thought one of them was drunk or something but then someone shouted he had been stabbed.

"There was a lad in the middle of the road screaming into a mobile phone for an ambulance and another was running to get someone's father.

"I knelt behind Jay and lifted up his shirt to find a stab wound. I noticed my hand was covered in blood and I shouted for my son Mark to come and help.

"We put him in the recovery position and when I lifted up his jacket that's when I noticed there was slit in Jay's back with a knife blade stuck there."

Mr Taylor said his first reaction was to rip off his shirt, roll it into a ball and start to put pressure on the wound in Jay's back.

While Mr Taylor and his son were helping the former Marina High School pupil in the street, his wife, Bernie, was on the telephone to the ambulance control centre.

Mr Taylor said: "Bernie was relaying to the ambulance control what we were doing and then she relayed to us what to do."

Mr Taylor and his son Mark noticed that Jay stopped breathing and his heart stopped. They then began giving him mouth to mouth resuscitation and heart massage in an attempt to keep him alive before paramedics arrived.

Mr Taylor said when Jay's father arrived at the scene he knelt beside the 16-year-old and kept talking to him.

Darren Mateer, 31, of no fixed address but formerly of Whitehawk, is charged with Jay's murder.

The court has heard that Jay and his friends shouted abuse at Mateer's sister Leanne and his brother Jonathan.

The trial continues.

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