Dundee Sheriff Court has heard harrowing evidence of how an 11-year-old boy screamed in terror as a family friend pinned him to the ground and poured a kettle of recently boiled water over his head.
The 42-year-old man knelt on the boy’s chest until he lost consciousness. The child was left with more than 40 injuries over his head and body.
The man told the police: ”I tried to kill him. I just thought it’s him or me and I had to kill him.”
The court heard the man has a history of mental illness. A jury took just over 10 minutes to acquit him of assaulting the boy and his mother at their home in Tayside on July 8 on the grounds he was insane at the time.
Two psychiatrists from Murray Royal Hospital in Perth gave evidence he was displaying increasingly psychotic behaviour in the period before the attacks.
The man accepted he carried out the attacks and an agreed statement outlining the family’s terrifying ordeal was read to the court.
Depute fiscal Douglas Wiseman said concern had been expressed about the man’s mental state and he had been left in the care of family friends that morning.
While the boy’s mother was making coffee, she turned to find him standing immediately behind her and he said: ”I love you. I love you,” and grabbed her wrist the began clawing at her top.
In an attempt to remove herself from an uncomfortable situation she suggested he use the computer but he picked up a walking stick and went out to the garden.
He became aggressive and started to drag the family dog by the neck through the house and out of the front door and began to hit the animal with the stick.
The woman pushed him away from the dog, at which point he turned on her and forced her to the ground. A struggle ensued and she screamed to her young son and three of his friends who were in the garden to get help.
The children ran indoors but the woman managed to break free and they all left the house.
The man chased the boy and grabbed him and when his friend tried to help he pushed her, causing her to fall against the fence. He then carried the boy into the kitchen where he banged the boy’s head on the floor and poured a kettle of recently boiled water over him.
The boy’s mother returned to the house with the neighbour to find the boy lying on his back on the floor with his attacker still in the room. She checked her son’s pulse and as he came to he began to scream, at which point the man moved towards him as if he was going to attack him again.
The neighbour described the man as ”not making much sense”.
The man later told the police he couldn’t believe what he had done and kept having ”flashbacks to the boy”.
He went on: ”I’m a mad man,” and added: ”I’m ashamed. I should be in hospital.”
He continued: ”I just flipped and attacked him ” It’s so dramatic. It’s not every day someone goes crazy and tries to kill a boy.”
Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Helen Kirk said the man was suffering from a bipolar disorder and his condition was deteriorating in the period leading up to July 8.
”He stopped thinking rationally,” she told the jury.
As an example, she said: ”One of the ideas that got into his head was that he was going to be abducted by the IRA. There was absolutely no reason for him to think this under normal circumstances”.
She said his illness explained his actions on July 8.
”We have a man who has no history of habitual aggression, who has a job and a social life and is a respectable citizen, who suddenly behaves in an extraordinarily abnormal way.”
Matters reached a peak on July 8, she continued, by which time his head was ”full of bizarre ideas it was as if he was in a nightmare, but he was wide awake.”
For example, she said, when he arrived at the home of his family friends, he saw the dog and a barbecue in the garden ”and immediately ‘realised’ that he was going to be skewered and barbecued and fed to the dog.”
Her colleague, Dr Thomas White, agreed the man was insane at the time of the attacks, saying he had begun to read ”malign interpretations into benign events.”
He said the man is responding to treatment but will require very careful monitoring when he is eventually returned to the community.
Following the jury’s verdict, Sheriff Elizabeth Munro followed the recommendations of the psychiatrists and imposed a compulsion order on the man, returning him to Murray Royal Hospital for treatment.
She also imposed a restriction order, explaining to the man that, as a result, his doctors will have to refer any plans for his release to the Scottish ministers and a tribunal.
”I think that is appropriate both for your sake and for the sake of public safety,” she added. ”As far as I am concerned you will continue to receive the best of treatment there and I do hope for your sake everything goes well.”