Man guilty of stabbing girl, 9, in the heart while she played with a hula hoop in the street

A man who stabbed a nine-year-old in the heart as she played with a hula hoop in the street has been convicted of murder.

Lilia Valutyte was attacked by Deividas Skebas, 26, in the town center of Boston, Lincolnshire, while she was playing outside her mother’s embroidery shop.

The Lithuanian defendant admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but was convicted of murder by a jury at Lincoln Crown Court on Thursday.

There was no dispute that Skebas, diagnosed with schizophrenia, killed Lilia, but the jury had to decide what his state of mind was at the time of the attack on July 28, 2022.

‘This deliberate murder was clearly a wicked act. He knew his conduct was wrong. He knew he was killing a child,’ Christopher Donnellan KC told jurors earlier this week.

He will be sentenced on February 25.

Lilia’s mother, Lina Savickiene, cradled her daughter after she was attacked in the street.

In a victim impact statement read for her by her husband, Aurelijus Savickas, the grieving mother said: ‘During these nine years we lived life fully, we visited many places, we didn’t stand still.

‘This is not something you recover from. Sometimes terrifying thoughts overwhelm the mind, and during this trial, there have been many, many more. Why her? Why us? The questions remain unanswered.’

Mr Savickas became Lilia’s stepfather when she was three, he said in his statement.

‘From that moment we walked our journey together,’ he said.

‘Becoming her stepfather was new for both of us, but I loved her as my own and always tried to be there for her.

‘Lilia, you will always live in our hearts, you are forever loved, forever missed.’

During the trial, defense barrister Andrew Campbell-Tiech KC told the jury Skebas was ‘quite obviously deluded’.

He said clinicians treating the killer doubted he would recover. The court heard that after the killing, Skebas said he had ‘the power to resurrect’ Lilia if the police contacted ‘his controller in Nasa’.

The defendant was transferred from prison to Rampton Hospital in December 2022.

Skebas is believed to have grown up in Leliūnai, Lithuania, before working with his dad in Norway for some time and later moved to the UK to work in a factory.

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