Patrick Allan Daken told police he had no idea why his younger brother Kelly suddenly attacked him with a metal poker and tried to kill him at their home in Port Levy, on Banks Peninsula.
"It was the most terrifying thing, out of nowhere. My brother tried to kill me, I know not why," he said in the video-taped police interview after the killing of Kelly Daken in June last year.
"I was lucky I had my pocket knife with me or I would be lying dead there right now," the 42-year-old bushman said.
The interview was played to the court on the second day of the trial of Daken on the charge of murdering his brother, Kelly Paul Daken. The trial is before Justice Graham Panckhurst and a jury in the High Court at Christchurch.
The partner of Kelly Daken, Karen Ottaway, told the court that Patrick and Kelly had a really good relationship, and were close friends.
She said Kelly told her during a visit to Christchurch that he was annoyed at some of the things he had found out about his brother Patrick, and was going to Port Levy to tell him that the family wanted to go to Port Levy again and not have to walk on eggshells around him.
He told her that he would scrap with him if it came to it, but he just wanted to go there to talk.
A former girlfriend of Patrick's, who has name suppression, said on the same day she had been talking to Kelly, and he told her that he was going to kneecap Patrick, smash his hand, and drop him at the hospital.
She said she calmed him down and left for an appointment.
She went back later in the day, as she was worried about what he had said, and he was still ranting and raving and was angry, she said. By the time she left him, he was calmer.
She later tried to contact him on his cellphone and also rang the family in Christchurch.
Later that night she received a phone call from Patrick asking her to meet him at Port Levy. He was screaming and crying, with pain in his voice.
He said Kelly came home, unpacked groceries, made coffee, then attacked him with the poker. Their brother Warren was there and saw it all.
"I swear I didn't start anything," he told her.
When she asked him where Kelly was, he said he was lying dead on the floor. "Now I have to work out what I have got to do," he said.
The brothers' uncle and aunt, Charles and Meri Crofts, said that when Warren and Patrick came to their house at Port Levy after the killing, Patrick asked them to phone the police.
In the police video of Patrick Daken's interview he said that he and Warren were sitting in the family home watching TV.
Kelly came home and put the groceries away, made a cup of tea and sat down.
Patrick thought he was going to check the fire, but he picked up the poker and swung it with all his might, he said.
He said he smashed it across his legs three or four times, while saying he was going to kill him.
"He was screaming and screaming and spitting in my face. I was so scared. I couldn't breathe. He was crushing me, leaning in and crushing me," he said.
Patrick said he got his knife out and stabbed Kelly in the back with it, while yelling at Kelly to get off him.
The trial may finish this week.
