THE victim of an alleged knife attack in Greenock was ‘already dead’ by the time bystanders rushed to help him, a court has heard.

A neighbour of Lee Monaghan said she found him lying in a pool of blood minutes after witnessing someone being ‘battered’ outside her flat in Inverclyde.

The witness, 49, said she saw an attacker lean over Lee and swing out at him six to eight times as he raised his arms to defend himself.

She said: “I couldn’t tell if they had anything in their hands.

“All I saw was punches or whatever and it was pretty fast.

“I just thought somebody was getting heavy battered, a heavy kicking.”

Minutes later Lee was lying dead in a pool of blood, a jury at the High Court in Livingston was told.

Stephen Kane is on trial charged with knifing the 23-year-old to death last August.

Kane, 21, earlier admitted killing Lee but claimed it was culpable homicide, not murder.

However, the Crown refused to accept his plea to the reduced charge. 

Giving evidence from behind a screen, a woman told the jury she turned away from her window and sat down for a couple of minutes after witnessing the attack.

She said: “My legs were like jelly. I just got a strange feeling – a nasty feeling – through my body. It made me sick.”

She said she picked up her mobile phone to call for an ambulance but found she had no credit.

She said: “I know now I didn’t need credit to phone 999. When I realised I had no credit I put it back down.”

She said she looked out again and saw the attacker ‘walking towards’ her home but stepped back from the window because she was scared he might see her.

She said: “He was swinging his arms as if he had a bit of a swagger about him.”

Moments later there was a loud banging at her door and a neighbour told her that Lee – who was known as ‘Mini’ because of his short stature – had been the victim of the attack.

She rushed outside with another neighbour and found him ‘barely conscious’ on the ground.

When they tried to lift him up a male ‘came out of nowhere’ and headbutted the man who was helping her to lift Lee, she said.

She told the jury: “We were screaming for help. I was just telling him we were here to help Lee, and to please phone an ambulance. 

“We were shouting for people to help us. We couldn’t lift the body or anything like that.”

Eventually, she said one of her neighbours managed to drag Lee into her porch.

As proceedings started yesterday, the jury was shown photographs of heavy blood staining on the floor of the porch and stairs near where Lee was attacked.

A taxi driver, 25, identified Kane as the man he had picked up in Tasker Street shortly before 11pm that night and dropped off at Belville Street.

He said Kane, who was wearing a dark hoodie with the hood up over a baseball cap, told him he was going to see his brother and chatted to him about boxing. 

Kane, presently detained at the Young Offenders Institution in Polmont, near Falkirk, is accused of pursuing and murdering Lee by repeatedly striking him on the body with a knife or knives. 

He is also charged with behaving in a threatening or abusive manner by demanding entry to a close and trying to gain entry to a flat at 12 Belville Street, Greenock, during the incident on 24 August 2016.

The same charge alleges that he presented two knives at Lee’s mum, Sandra Monaghan, and placed her in a state of fear and alarm by threatening to inflict violence on Lee with the weapons.

Kane is further accused of shouting foul-mouthed threats at police officers in Greenock’s Tasker Street, fleeing from them and failing to comply with repeated requests to stop in Davey Street, Don Street and Greenock Cemetery on 25 August.

A final charge alleges that he knowingly attempted to pervert the course of justice by telling two constables at the cemetery that his name was Ryan Beattie.

He denies all the charges and the trial, before Lord Clark, continues.