A man has denied stabbing father-of-two Darren Adie to death in a Kirkcaldy street last May.
At the beginning of his trial at the High Court in Dunfermline, Gordon Coventry, 52, denied killing Mr Adie by repeatedly striking him on the body with a knife or similar implement in Spey Avenue near to its junction with Napier Street on May 28.
Coventry is also accused of throwing stones at Mr Adie and having a pair of scissors in his possession earlier on May 7 in Overton Mains.
A further charge alleges that Coventry was concerned in the supply of cannabis and cannabis resin on various occasions between January 1 and June 13 2016.
The court heard a harrowing account of the moment Mr Adie was found bleeding to death at the side of the road in Tweed Avenue, with the jury played a recording of the 999 call made by local woman Frances McArthur.
Fighting back tears as she gave evidence, Mrs McArthur, 62, revealed how she had been returning home from her son Gordon’s house in Lawson Street on the day in question when she came across Mr Adie.
“I saw a man lying half on the road half off the road and if I’m honest I thought he was drunk,” she said.
“When I phoned the ambulance that’s when I saw the blood on the ground.”
Mrs McArthur told the court how she saw an inch-long stab wound through Mr Adie’s T-shirt on the left side of his chest, and confirmed that the victim was bleeding profusely.
Mr Adie was breathing at first, she said, but she recalled: “I was able to hear him but then he took an almighty coughing fit which made him sit up.
“Then he fell back down again and I heard him inhaling three times and then I never heard anything after that.”
The court was then played a recording of Mrs McArthur’s 999 call, which lasted 10 minutes until an ambulance arrived on scene.
In it she could be heard saying to the operator: “There’s blood gushing out of him…it looks as though he’s been stabbed.”
During the conversation with the operator, Mrs McArthur later says the injured man’s breathing was getting “slower and slower all the time”.
She told the operator: “There’s that long in between each breath, it’s frightening.”
Mrs McArthur told the court that Mr Adie’s dentures fell out of his mouth at the side of the road as he lay dying.
“I was frightened because of what was happening to the boy,” she continued.
“I thought he was going to die, because of his breathing.”
The trial before Lord Uist is expected to last eight days.
