By Jason Evans
The jury trying two men accused of the murder of Swansea dad Joshua Norman has retired to begin considering its verdicts after two weeks of evidence. Mr Noman suffered a fatal neck wound in an incident in the Hafod area of the city in September last year. Despite the best efforts of passers-by and the emergency services, the 27-year-old died at the scene. Uncle and nephew Paul Rosser and Joshua Cullen are accused of murdering Mr Norman – a charge they deny – and are on trial at Swansea Crown Court . It is the prosecution case that after the defendants and Mr Norman had been driven around Swansea on the morning of September 11, 2024, looking for drugs an altercation took place between Mr Norman and 32-year-old Cullen in Upper Strand. It is alleged that after the three men walked through the tunnel which leads to Cwm Road, 49-year-old Rosser smashed the glass cider bottle he was holding and used it to stab Mr Norman in the throat while 32-year-old Cullen “assisted or encouraged” him in the “murderous assault.” Both men are then said to have walked off to Cullen’s flat in nearby Griffith John Street where he lived with his mother – Rosser’s sister – “leaving Mr Norman to die in the gutter”. Neither defendant chose to give evidence at the trial but it is Rosser’s case that Mr Norman became aggressive in the car after smoking crack cocaine and he headbutted and smashed the rear passenger window of the Audi. He says that after the men were kicked out of the car by the driver and made their way to Cwm Road, the broken bottle came into contact with Mr Norman’s neck when Mr Norman “lunged” at him and grabbed the bottle off him. It is Cullen’s case too that Mr Norman became aggressive in the car and then assaulted him and threatened to kill him when they were on Upper Strand. He says he caused no injury to Mr Norman. In his closing speech to the jury Allan Compton KC, for Rosser, told jurors there were “far too many pieces of the jigsaw missing” for them to be sure of his client’s guilt . The barrister said his client, by his own admission, had been on a four-day “bender” of drink and drugs prior to the incident and said Mr Norman had consumed “prodigious” amounts of alcohol and drugs – including cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, and pregabalin – and said it was not impossible to predict how the “toxic combination of drink and drugs” would have affected him. He told the jury: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because somebody ended up dead it must have been a deliberate act as opposed to stupid, reckless behaviour driven by what they had been drinking and doing that day.” In his closing speech to the jury, Cullen’s barrister Andrew Jones KC described the prosecution case as “misguided and baseless” . He told the court that on the basis of poor-quality CCTV of the parties before the incident and then CCTV and eyewitness accounts of the defendants after the incident the prosecution had drawn a “string of tenuous links” and was inviting the jury to “guess” answers to fill in the gaps in its evidence. He said there was no evidence of exactly where his client had been standing when the bottle had been broken, no evidence that he had known what was going to happen, and “not a shred of evidence” of him assisting or encouraging his uncle. He told jurors: “The case is entirely circumstantial. We invite you to find the evidence is so weak [Cullen] has no case to answer…. Mere presence is not enough. The prosecution know that so they are asking you to speculate and guess. You are being asked to guess in a murder trial.” During the trial the jury has been shown CCTV evidence of the movements of the defendants and Mr Norman in the hours and minutes before the fatal incident and of the movements of the defendants in the moments after the incident. The fatal incident itself, which happened at the tunnel which links Cwm Road and Upper Strand, was not caught on camera. For th e latest court reports sign up to our crime newsletter The jury has also heard evidence from a delivery driver dropping off a parcel to a business in Cwm Road and from people living in Cwm Road who saw Rosser fighting with another man on the street around half an hour after the fatal incident and who heard a man shouting: “I have murdered my best mate”. The court has also heard toxicology evidence about the drugs found in the systems of the three men and about the defendants’ previous convictions – Rosser has 45 previous convictions for 215 offences including wounding, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, aggravated burglary, and robbery while Cullen has previous convictions for two robberies and one for wounding. Paul David Rosser, of McRitchie Place, Gendros, Swansea, and Joshua Lee Cullen, of Griffith John Street, Dyfatty, Swansea, deny murder and a lesser alternative of manslaughter. The trial before judge Geraint Walters continues.