A teaching assistant accused of stamping on his pregnant ex-girlfriend’s stomach after she refused to have an abortion told a court he was having a “nap” at the time of the attack.
Kevin Wilson, 22, allegedly launched the sickening attack on Malorie Bantala in Peckham because he was not ready to be a father.
Wilson and a seventeen-year-old boy, who cannot be named, wore motorbike helmets to disguise themselves before “deliberately targeting her stomach in order to destroy her unborn baby”, it is claimed.
The lifeless baby boy had to be delivered stillborn by emergency Caesarean section after the attack by the Pelican Estate on June 15.
But Wilson, giving evidence at the Old Bailey, insisted he did not go to Peckham at any time between 5.30pm and 8.30pm that day.
After leaving work at Octavia House School in Walworth at 4.30pm he said he went home to Bermondsey.
“I was playing with kids the whole day, I went home and I had a nap,” he said.
Asked why his phone made no outgoing calls and received missed calls during this time, he said: “I was actually sleeping and put my phone on silent.”
Earlier he told the court he met Miss Bantala at a friend’s birthday party while they were both studying at the University of Bedfordshire, in Luton.
By his third year they were both seeing other people and had all but lost touch.
They rekindled their romance in the summer of 2014 during an end of university celebration trip to Ibiza, jurors heard.
Miss Bantala then fell pregnant after the pair had unprotected sex in a hotel on November 15 last year after Wilson offered to comfort her over the death of her five-year-old nephew, Cameron.
Wilson said he assumed she was still using contraception “because she usually does” and was “shocked and surprised’ when she called him in December to say she was pregnant.
“I told Malorie that I’m too young to have a child,” he said in court, and suggested she have an abortion.
He went with her to the Pregnancy Advisory Service in Waterloo but after the appointment she told him she wanted to keep the baby.
Wilson said: “Again I was shocked and surprised and I told her practical reasons why we shouldn’t – we are too young, we both live in our parents’ flats and we are not ready to have a child.”
He later lied to her about moving to Ghana to convince her to have an abortion before they ceased all contact after an argument in January this year.
“It was too much for me to take, she was behaving erratic, telling me she was going to make my life hell,” he added.
After a friend accused him of not looking after his child in May, he called Malorie and said:
“How can you say I’m the baby’s father when you are sleeping with other men?”
Wilson denied going to Peckham the day before the attack, when witnesses saw two men in motorcycle helmets hanging around suspiciously.
DNA testing established it is 490 million times more likely that Wilson was the father of the child than an unrelated male, the court heard.
He handed himself into police the day after the attack but denied any knowledge of it.
Wilson, of Stansfield House, Longfield Estate, Bermondsey, and the seventeen-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, deny causing grievous bodily harm with intent and child destruction.
The trial continues.