A man has told a jury of the moment he was set upon by a dog then stabbed in the arm and back.
Brian Skillin claims he opened his front door of his Inverness home and heard the words “Tyson, get him!” before being attacked by the dog.
Then, as he reached for tool in his hallway to fight off the animal, he was stabbed before his attacker put a knife to his throat and told him he was “a dead man”.
Mr Skillin was giving evidence at Inverness Sheriff Court on the first day of the trial of David Hobbs, 43, who denies assaulting him to his severe injury and permanent disfigurement.
The jury was told that prior to the alleged incident in Anderson Court, Merkinch, on October 5 2019 the pair lived close to each other and had exchanged a number of aggressive calls and messages.
It’s claimed that Hobbs expressed his concern that other people thought Mr Skillin was “harder” than him and that Mr Skillin suggested they go outside for a fight in order to settle the matter.
Mr Skillin told the court Hobbs declined because “he said he was having his dinner”.
Under questioning by fiscal depute Martina Eastwood, Mr Skillin described the incident.
He said: “I got woken up by a bang on my door about nine or ten, I know it was early. I opened the door and it was: ‘Tyson, get him!'”
He said the dog attacked his leg and he used a hatchet to fight it off.
“I was trying to punch it in the head but it was not making any difference,” he said.
“I turned to grab one of my woodworking tools. I got a hatchet. I didn’t want to use the sharp end so I turned it round about. I hit the dog and it skiffed its ear and the dog ran off.”
Mr Skillin said while he was preoccupied with the dog Hobbs attacked, stabbing him in the arm and back with the what he described as a “12-inch Gurkha knife” with a “curved blade”.
‘Did you think this was my first rodeo?’
“He had the knife to my throat,” Mr Skillin told the court. “He said ‘Did you think this was my first rodeo? You’re a dead man.”
Mr Skillin denied suggestions from defence counsel Pauline Chapman that he was able to describe the knife so clearly because it was his own knife that he had previously shown to Hobbs because he was “proud” of it.
He admitted that his communications with Hobbs had been “aggressive in nature” but said that he had just responded to how Hobbs had communicated with him, adding: “Every action has a reaction.”
A neighbour who witnessed the incident told the court that he had seen a man he believed to be Hobbs holding a knife, and Mr Skillin with blood on his clothes – but conceded he had not witnessed events leading up to this moment.
The jury were shown photographs of Hobbs, of Mossvale Road, Glasgow, taken following the incident which showed a small injury to the back of his head and a bloody cut to one of his hands.
The trial, before Sheriff Sara Matheson, continues.
