A teenager who broke a stranger’s hip during an Elgin town centre attack has been ordered to pay his victim £1,000 in compensation.
Jordan Carnegie was just 17 and drunk when he attacked the man, who had just left the Muckle Cross pub on High Street.
The now 18-year-old battered the man’s head repeatedly off the ground and left him so badly injured he had to receive surgery for a fractured and dislocated hip, Elgin Sheriff Court was told.
Fiscal depute Victoria Silver said the attack happened just outside the St Giles Church at around 8pm on September 2 last year.
She said Carnegie’s victim had spent an hour at the Wetherspoons pub with a colleague after work and was attacked out of the blue as the pair walked west along High Street.
Bypassers had to intervene
“They saw the accused standing near to the church and he appeared to be angry,” Ms Silver said.
“He lunched towards them and the complainer stuck his arm out to protect himself but the accused then pushed this man to the ground where he punched and struck him and repeatedly hit the man’s head against the stone pavement.
“Members of the public intervened to help the complainer and drag the accused off.”
Carnegie made off before police arrived and when his victim tried to get up he realised he was suffering a pain in his hip, which, after being taken by ambulance to Dr Grays Hospital, was diagnosed as fractured and dislocated.
When police caught up with Carnegie half an hour later, he seemed agitated and told them he had been in a fight and “he had been jumped”.
The injured man had to be taken to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary for surgery on his hip.
Carnegie initially denied the charges but later admitted assault to severe injury at a trial diet.
His defence agent Matthew O’Neill said his client had been drinking that afternoon in Keith but travelled to Elgin after a disagreement.
“He was significantly under the influence of alcohol – at 17 he acknowledges that should not have been the case. He had been trying to show off to an extent to these individuals. From the CCTV the three of them appeared to have been fooling around on High Street.”
Sheriff Gordon Fleetwood interrupted that there was “no excuse for breaking a complete stranger’s hip”.
‘Try and mitigate that’
“What we have is an unprovoked attack on two strangers in a public street. Try and mitigate that,” the sheriff told the solicitor.
The solicitor added that Carnegie had a “difficult childhood” and intimated he had since stopped drinking alcohol.
Carnegie, of Den Crescent, Keith, was handed a two-year supervision order, 200 hours of unpaid work and told to pay his victim £1,000 as a direct alternative to custody.
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