Amati said the next thing she remembers was sitting on the balcony of her inner west share house, rocking back and forth and smoking cannabis, “trying to calm myself down, trying to anaesthetise myself so I would just fall asleep”.



She said she was listening to her favourite song “Flatline” by American band Periphery.

Her barrister Charles Waterstreet quoted lyrics from the song in court, saying: “Send an angel to pull me from the hell below / This weight is far too much to own and this body doesn’t feel like home.”

At hearing those words in court, Amati started nodding before dissolving into tears and burying her face in a tissue.

“I think that’s my favourite line, yeah,” she said, adding “I just wanted someone to come and stroke my head and tell me everything would be OK.”

The first line of the song is “Your eyes judge like a jury locked in a trial”, the court heard.

While on the balcony, Amati said, “the voices became louder, they stopped being whispers and started being actual words”. She started to see violent visions she had previously had about attempting suicide and became “really teary”, the court heard.

After that, Amati said she has just one more memory of that evening.

“That voice that had been telling me to kill, maim, inflict pain on people and start the rise of hell on Earth,” she said. “I recall everything going quiet and feeling that voice come inside and I remember that smile. The smile that was not mine. A sinister smile that plastered my face that I couldn’t control, and I black out.”

Amati said she has no memory of anything that happened at the 7-Eleven, or her subsequent arrest. She denied the suggestion, based on evidence from ambulance officers, that she had been faking unconsciousness after the attack.

“I don’t recall a single thing that happened until I woke up shackled to a bed, surrounded by a nurse and police," she said.



“Some time later, I was called into a room, escorted by two police officers, two medical professionals. I didn’t know what their qualifications were but they started asking me questions. They told me that anything I said would be handed to the police. When they said that it started indicating to me that something very very bad had happened. If it had been a suicide attempt there wouldn’t be that kind of scrutiny.”

Amati said she found out what she had done gradually, through the questions and comments of custodial officers, a news report she saw at Silverwater Women’s Prison, and from a psychiatrist.