Woman stabbed in skull with sword
A man used a Lord of the Rings replica sword to stab his sleeping girlfriend through the skull, an Adelaide jury has been told.
Prosecutor Mark Norman said Adam Alberi had repeatedly claimed his girlfriend had attacked him and accidentally stabbed herself in the head with the sharpened object.
"The prosecution say that explanation is as untrue as it is physically impossible and that he was in fact trying to kill her," he told the South Australian Supreme Court jury.
Alberi, 25, has pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder of Karina Todorashko, 27, in July 2013 at the unit they shared in Adelaide's inner south.
Mr Norman said the couple had argued and Ms Todorashko told him she was going to leave him.
"Mr Alberi's state of mind was such that he couldn't or wouldn't let her go," he said.
The relationship between Alberi, an Iraqi national, and Ms Todorashko, who came to Australia from Ukraine as a teenager, was "difficult, volatile and complicated", the prosecutor said.
The sword, a replica of one used in the Lord of the Rings films, had been sharpened deliberately.
"It's turned what may well have been purely an ornamental piece of movie memorabilia into something anyone would recognise as a lethal weapon," Mr Norman said.
Ms Todorashko woke up after feeling an object in her head.
"She has some memory of pulling that object out of her head," Mr Norman said.
"She also has a memory of seeing Mr Alberi holding the object, which she was only able to describe as some sort of blade."
Despite bleeding profusely, she jumped over the flat's balcony, climbed down an awning and onto the balcony of the flat below.
Her neighbour woke to find her in his bedroom, unable to talk and badly injured.
Ms Todorashko told the jury she remembered little of the circumstances around the attack but had woken up after feeling something in her head.
She feared she was going to die because she was bleeding so much.
"Can I just say to the whole jury, I mean the juries, I want this case to be over, whether he did it or not I forgive him," Ms Todorashko said.
The trial continues.
