Students: Suspect bloody

On an early February morning, Michael Hernandez entered his computer class about 15 minutes late -- unusual for him -- with his white T-shirt and leg spotted with blood. His teacher, Claudette Levermore, asked the 14-year-old Southwood Middle School student about the conspicuous stains.

''He told Miss Levermore that he got pushed by people and he got a bloody nose,'' a computer lab classmate recalled during an interview with a Miami-Dade police detective.

The classmate said Hernandez later told two girls that he got pushed into a door and broke his jaw, and told another girl that he ran into a wall.

The classmate's description of Hernandez after he allegedly killed Jaime Gough, 14, in a bathroom at the Palmetto Bay school was repeated by other computer lab students in sworn statements released Thursday by Miami-Dade prosecutors.

Their recollections of Hernandez just after the Feb. 3 murder -- along with tidbits of information such as the pictures of decapitated heads and gore on his computer screen -- create a macabre image of the school boy. He faces a first-degree murder charge, accused of stabbing the face, neck and hands of Jaime, a close friend who played the violin.

Hernandez's attorney, Richard Rosenbaum, told a Miami-Dade judge this week that ''Hernandez is mentally ill and not competent for trial.'' Circuit Judge Henry Leyte-Vidal is scheduled to hold a competency hearing on Aug. 19 -- a critical crossroad for the teen because he is being tried as an adult.

Rosenbaum must show that Hernandez is incapable of assisting his defense -- a position already refuted by two court-appointed specialists who evaluated Hernandez and said he was competent to stand trial. If the judge finds Hernandez competent, it is likely Rosenbaum will pursue an insanity defense. The child faces life imprisonment without parole if convicted.

In the 14 sworn statements released Thursday, the classmates who knew Hernandez, Jaime or both, describe them as good friends who would often meet to talk by a tree outside the middle school before starting classes.

On that February morning, most of them said Hernandez asked his teacher permission to go to the bathroom to clean the blood stains off his T-shirt and leg below his blue-jean shorts. He returned to class.

Later in the morning, just as first period was ending, the students said they heard over the public address system that Southwood Middle was in ''code red.'' Students said they could not leave their classrooms because something terrible had happened at school.

Hernandez's classmates described him as unusually quiet and jittery that morning. They learned via radio, cell phones and media websites that a student was killed.

A security guard brought in a tray of lunches for the computer lab students. Afterward, administrators took Hernandez out of the class for questioning.

Students overheard him say ''sh--'' as he left the classroom with his backpack, which contained the alleged murder weapon, a pocketknife stained with blood that tests would later confirm was Jaime's.

While almost all the classmates who gave statements said they saw nothing in Hernandez's personality to suggest he could commit such a horrific crime, one student said she had heard that the schoolboy wanted to kill two classmates.