Stratford man jailed for hammer attack

A Stratford man who attacked a teenage girl with a hammer after tricking her into his house has been jailed for 16 years.

Adam Sargent, 30, of Elm Road, was found guilty of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, False imprisonment and criminal damage, by a jury at Warwick Crown Court in November, though sentence was deferred until today for pre-sentence reports to be prepared.

During the trial the court heard that Sargent attacked the woman in February 2015 after asking her to come into his house because his partner wanted to ask her something about a job at the place where she worked.

Upon entering the house, Sargent grabbed her by the throat and put his hand over her mouth.

He said that her nan and mum owed him money and he needed to ‘prove to his boys that he could do something about it.’

He tied a cloth tightly over her head and mouth and took a picture with her phone, before once again grabbing her by the throat as she begged him to let her go.

Sargent then pushed her to the floor and hit her a number of times in the head with a hammer, resulting in heavy bleeding.

Once he stopped, he made her go to the bathroom to clean herself up, and he then handed her the key to the back door.

However as she put the key in the door he grabbed her once again by the throat, holding her against a wall so tight that she couldn’t breathe.

The woman managed to get away as they both fell the ground and picked up a kitchen knife to try and defend herself.

Sargent managed to disarm her and then held the point of the knife to her throat.

The woman pleaded with Sargent to let her go, offering to pay whatever money he claimed to be owed and assuring him she would not report him.

She told him that he could walk her to work to make sure she did not immediately raise the alarm.

Before leaving with her, Sargent put a knife into the waistband of his trousers, but as they got near to Tesco she suddenly made a break for it and ran to the store where she told her boss what had happened and the police were called.

Sargent returned to the house, and when officers got there they found he was hiding in the loft.

But instead of coming down when the police told him to do so, Sargent kicked out a number of roof tiles and climbed out onto the roof, where he remained for some time before being persuaded to come back inside and was arrested.

In court, Sargent had denied luring the young woman into the house or attacking her with the hammer, and said he had taken a knife from her in the kitchen but had not threatened her with it.

He said he had been ‘in a bad place’ at the time, and had tried to hang himself from the loft hatch with a length of torn sheet in the early hours of that morning.

When questioned about the incident in court Sargent claimed he had suffered a blackout and only remembered snippets of what happened.

Following his conviction in November it was revealed that Sargent had already served a sentence of imprisonment for the public protection.

That was an indefinite sentence imposed in 2008 for what a judge at that time described as ‘an unprovoked and senseless attack’ on a man who was walking home from a party in Coventry.