Forty-year-old Paolo Avigliano, the Italian chef who was stabbed to death in the kitchen of Caffé Da Vinci at Market Place in St Andrew in July 2012, might have been the author of his own demise at the hands of Latoya Wilks, the then 23-year-old charged with his stabbing death, attorney Sean Kinghorn told a Supreme Court sitting yesterday.

A seven-member jury in the case presided over by Supreme Court Judge Justice Vivienne Harris had just, moments before, viewed video footage and stills of the July 1, 2012 incident captured by cameras which manned the kitchen area at the establishment.

During the replay, tears streamed down the face of the now 31-year-old accused, who has been out on bail since 2012.

Kinghorn, prefacing his defence ahead of his client’s unsworn testimony from the dock, said Wilks had merely acted to prevent her own demise from the Italian who was known for his temper tantrums and who had also reportedly threatened his client several times that night, branding her a “bitch” repeatedly.

“Mr Foreman and members of the jury, I want to be honest with you, when you went home last night I am sure you thought about the case. I thought about it too. In light of what was the most sensational thing I could start with, I came up with this:

“A woman is God’s special gift, she must be cherished, and protected. To be honest, when I looked at the video I thought it really is callous; the loss of any life, in any circumstance, is regrettable. I am here to present on behalf of Miss Wilks, but I can’t divorce the fact that somebody has died, but I still say… that a woman is God’s special gift and she must be protected and cherished,” Kinghorn said.

“Too often men don’t hold women to the standard she is to be held to. You would have heard from her deposition that Paolo was comfortable to call her a bitch. He was in a temper tantrum. When a man calls a woman a bitch it must not be taken lightly. From what you saw of him on the video you know the kind of person he was. Our women must be protected; the law gives them the right to protect themselves when the shield is not there,” he continued.

Added Kinghorn, “The case is really about did Miss Wilks kill this person unlawfully or was he the author of his own misfortune with how he was behaving that day with that temper tantrum, with how he came back into the kitchen? When he was taken to his boss I found it so funny that she said he left his apron in her office. A chef who is going back into a kitchen to cook can’t leave his apron, so he must have gone into that kitchen with some other purpose in his mind.

“He took up a knife, puts it back down, walks in her direction; there is only one thing he came back there to do. She should have been cherished and protected, and when there was no protection she had a right to stop herself from being the deceased,” Kinghorn said.

Yesterday the diminutive Wilks, who was at the time a student in training, recounted an initial encounter in May of the same year with Avigliano in which he reportedly called her “expletive bitch”.

She said to defuse the situation her boss ordered him away from her, and she had no further contact with him until that fateful evening in July when Avigliano, while frying fish, accidentally splashed her in the face with hot oil.

“I said to him, ‘Paolo, the oil burn mi in ma face’, and he said, ‘What do you want me to do about that?’” Wilks recalled.

She said she did not reply but felt the brunt of Avigliano’s anger when a colleague told him to apologise to her.

Wilks said she went to report the matter to her boss and ended up waiting quite a while before returning to the kitchen unwillingly but in deference to her manager.

“I went back in the kitchen and I was walking past Paolo when he said ‘You expletive bitch, informer muss dead… you are an expletive informer,’” Wilks told the court.

She said upon walking back to her work station Avigliano again came to her and said, “Yuh expletive black bitch, mi a go get rid a yuh tiddeh.” She said he then threatened to take up a skillet that was nearby with hot oil to douse her.

According to Wilks, at this point she already had a knife in her hand that she was using to “cut up vegetables”.

“I walked down to the end of the counter and he came around the other side to the end of the counter also. I said to him, ‘You already burn me with oil and you waan come back come bun mi again?’,” she told the court, noting that the chef was then told to leave the kitchen by other staff members. She said he did not move and had to be pushed out.

Wilks said when Avigliano returned, her back was turned and she did not see him.

“I only heard when he said, ‘Weh di bitch deh?’ He came up in front of me, he took up an eight-inch knife off the table, and he said ‘I’m going to throw this at you’,” she told the court. According to Wilks, when she told the Italian she would be reporting him to the boss again and started walking away, he told her he would “strangle” her if she did so.

“I have seen Paolo angry before, I have seen him upset, I have seen him in his temper tantrums before, but that look he had on his face when he said it, he was walking towards me, it is as if he was possessed, his eyes were red, I have never seen that look on his face before …I did not know what he was going to do, but in that moment I was afraid. He grabbed on to me, and when he grabbed me I took up the knife and held it up,” Wilks testified in a tremulous voice.

“I had no intention of using the knife to stab him or hurt him, I just wanted him to see the knife and back off… I thought he would back off …I was trying to push him off and I kept going backward and he pushed me. I stumbled, my hand went down with the knife, and I don’t know what happened after that,” she told the graveyard-still courtroom.

In the drama that followed, Wilks said she was shocked and did not know what to do.

“I started pacing, I started panicking, I honestly had no intention of hurting Paolo,” she told the court.

In the video of the incident shown to the court yesterday, Wilks’ co-workers at the time were seen frantically trying to help Avigliano, who stood stock-still some moments after being stabbed as blood gushed from the wound, thoroughly soaking his white garb before he fell to the floor. The panicked individuals could be seen trying to stop the flow of blood at one point while others fled from the room.

Avigliano, who was observed moving his head at points, twitched one last time while being held by an individual before going still, seemingly succumbing to his injury.

Yesterday, a police officer called by the prosecution told the court that he arrested and charged Wilks on July 5 of that year at Duhaney Park Police Station where she had been held. Asked what was done with the weapon used to stab Avigliano that night, the cop said it had been retrieved and submitted to the forensic lab and was then placed at Half-Way-Tree Police Station in storage. He, however, told the court that the weapon could not be produced as it could not be found, even though the records show that it is “still there”.

“It was placed in a brown envelope, sealed, labelled, and submitted to the lab. I wrote on the envelope the facts surrounding the matter,” he told the court.

Asked whether he was aware that two knives had actually come into play as the deceased had also pulled a knife at Wilks, the sergeant said he had only secured the knife that was pointed out to him by Wilks as the murder weapon on the night in question. He also told the court, under questioning from Kinghorn, that based on what Wilks had said to him when she was cautioned before a question-and-answer session he had gathered that she feared Avigliano.

The case will continue this morning when it is expected that two individuals will give character witness statements on behalf of the accused.