By Cam Lucadou-Wells
A “severely intoxicated” 22-year-old has thrown his mother against a cupboard, threatened to have his “boys” bash her and to burn down her Doveton home with her inside it, a court has heard.
About 11am on 5 March, the man had returned from shops and started drinking in the kitchen.
He asked his mother in the lounge room for cigarettes, and didn’t like her answer, police prosecutor Leading Senior Constable Andrew Osmond said.
The man told his mum: “F*** you, you slut. Go and kill yourself.”
As she attempted to call police, he threw her against the cupboard.
He allegedly said: “If I go to jail, you just wait, mate.
“I’ll get my boys to bash you.
“If I go to jail, I’ll burn this place down with you in it.”
The man was soon arrested for breaching a full family violence intervention order and released on bail for what was his third charged assault on his mother.
The same day at 10pm, he returned to the house in breach of the order to “check my belongings” and was arrested.
Defence lawyer Adrian Dessi said the man’s decision making and memory of the incidents were affected by being “severely intoxicated” but conceded he shouldn’t have been even at the house due to the intervention order.
Mr Dessi said up to last July, the man had never offended.
That was until his drinking “escalated” and since then he’d been charged with cannabis possession, being drunk in a public place, failing to appear at court and assaulting his mother and father.
Both parents had since been protected by intervention orders.
“The drink is controlling him,” Mr Dessi said of his client.
A Corrections report assessed the man as a medium risk of re-offending, with the man under the influence during the assaults and later blaming provocation by his family.
Magistrate Jack Vandersteen said the man had little insight into his “appalling” and “frightening” behaviour, and didn’t accept the man’s claims that his family made him do it.
“No mother would expect her son to talk to her like that.
“You’re obviously drinking way too much … and your family members are greatest at risk.”
Mr Vandersteen said parents in a family-violence situation would go to police for help as a last resort.
“They do that when they feel they can’t protect themselves.”
The man was convicted and sentenced to a 12-month supervised corrections order with alcohol-abuse and mental health treatment.
