Murdered gypsy was ‘no fighter’
A bodybuilder who was battered to death by his cousins on his way home from a gypsy wedding ‘trained to look good’ but was not a ‘fighter’, a court heard.
Quhey Saunders, 20, was killed by a single blow with a steel plasterer’s whisk during a brawl with Simon Baker, 22, and Mikey Coyle, 21, at an M25 service station.
But Baker and Coyle Mr Saunders was the aggressor and he was killed when they acted in self-defence.
Jurors were shown a video of Quhey throwing punches in a gym and a photo of him getting a score of 948 out of 1000 on an arcade boxing machine.
But his brother Luke, an ‘elite amateur boxer’, denied suggestions Quhey was ‘fighting fit’.
He said: ‘Yes, he was a big lad, but everybody can be a gym boy.
‘Quhey trained to look good, he wasn’t a fighter. Quhey was a very vain person, he liked looking after his physical appearance.’
Witnesses saw the barechested Mr Saunders squaring up to the two men near the petrol pumps and shop at Cobham Services in Essex on 26 June.
Earlier van driver Lee Mitchell told the Old Bailey he heard ‘a lot of shouting’ but added: ‘I couldn’t make out the words because they were speaking very fast and because of their accents.’
He took a short mobile phone video of the row which was played in court.
Another witness, army reservist James Hamilton, told the court: ‘He got hit and got straight back up again which is why I think the other two went to get weapons, because he looked like a fighter and they didn’t look like they were fighters like him.
‘If you looked at them like they were fighters in a ring the smaller man kept moving out of range, he didn’t really want to engage.’
The prosecution claim Baker and Coyle were ‘spoiling’ for a fight when they drove to the service station and exchanged ‘heated words’ with Mr Saunders.
Jurors heard they grabbed the whisk and a shovel from their van before launching the fatal attack.
Baker, of [8] Ivy Hatch Residential Site, Green Lane, Outwood, Redhill, Surrey, and Coyle, of 53 Howsman Barnes, Kingston, both deny murder.
The trial continues.
ends
