A Moray burns victim has been jailed after attacking a man who insulted his appearance with a hammer.
Kyle Stewart was severely burned in a blaze at a Moray caravan park more than six years ago and required several operations, skin grafts and plastic surgery to reconstruct his head and upper body after a faulty gas canister exploded and set his clothes alight.
Stewart, 25, was furious when he heard that Andrew McLaren had recently joked about his predicament.
Elgin Sheriff Court heard yesterday he left Mr McLaren in a bloodied mess after hitting him in the head with a claw hammer.
Stewart spotted his victim on Elgin’s Balmoral Terrace on Thursday, September 15.
Fiscal, Alex Swain, said: “A witness heard a car approaching at speed and then its brakes screeching.
“The accused then ran towards the complainer and hit him on the left side of his face with a claw hammer, using the claw side.”
The victim suffered a cut behind his left ear, which needed to be glued shut.
Solicitor, Stephen Carty, said Mr McLaren had “made some unsavoury remarks” about his client’s appearance.
But he added that did not excuse Stewart’s “stupid decision” to attack him.
Stewart, of 2 Whitefield Court in Buckie, admitted assaulting Mr McLaren by striking him on the head with a hammer.
He accepted another charge of behaving in a threatening manner towards his partner at Pinegrove in Elgin on August 7, by shouting at her and kicking a draining board containing cutlery and crockery.
Stewart also pleaded guilty to behaving in a threatening manner at Dr Gray’s Hospital on September 28, by “screaming and swearing” at a nurse.
Sheriff Olga Pasportnikov said Stewart appeared to be on a “downwards spiral towards self-destruction”.
She sentenced him to a combined 486 days in prison for all three offences.