A would-be carjacker who claimed to have a firearm near a city centre toy store has been spared jail at Inverness Sheriff Court.
Ellis Williams, 21, called 999 and said he had a shotgun near Smyths Toys in Inverness and was planning to shoot himself.
But when police traced Williams he was attempting to force a couple from their vehicle with a screwdriver.
Williams appeared via videolink from custody for sentencing having previously admitted charges of assault with intent to rob and possession of an offensive weapon.
Shotgun claim in 999 call
At a previous hearing fiscal depute Susan Love said it was just before 7pm on January 1 of this year when a call came in from Ellis, who “stated he was in the area of Smyths Toys, was in possession of a shotgun and intended to shoot himself”.
Not long after this, a couple returned to their vehicle in the Strothers Lane car park and turned on the ignition to defrost the windscreen.
At this point, Williams approached the vehicle holding what the pair then believed to be a knife and demanding they hand over their keys.
The driver resisted Williams’ demands, grabbing the keys from the ignition, before attempting to reason with the would-be carjacker and telling him to go home.
When this did not work the man struck out at Williams.
At this point, officers who had been searching for Williams following his earlier call arrived on the scene.
They told Williams to drop the weapon, which was later discovered to be a screwdriver.
The fiscal depute said neither of the vehicle’s occupants was injured during the stand-off but she told the court that both were “terrified”.
‘A vulnerable young man’
At the sentencing hearing solicitor Shahid Latif, for Williams, said his client was “a vulnerable young man” who suffered from difficulties in regulating his emotions as a result of a developmental disorder.
He said: “He hasn’t sought to minimise his responsibility he accepts the consequences his conduct would have had on those who were affected.”
Sheriff Eilidh MacDonald told Williams: “These were very serious offences – I could quite easily send you to jail for a very long time.
“This is not the first time you have behaved in this way – you cannot behave in this way towards people and expect that the court is not going to consider sending you to jail.”
Sheriff MacDonald recognised that Williams had already served the equivalent of an eight-month jail sentence on remand and told him: “You are still a young man, you are still growing up, you need to grow up some more.”
She placed Williams, of Lochloy, on a community payback order with two years of social work supervision and 150 hours of unpaid work in the community.
She also ordered that he complete the Smart recovery programme, designed to address issues with alcohol and drug misuse