Another Vignette Of Modern Life…

Dominic McGrath, 62, was given a community order and ordered to undergo mental health treatment for chasing the terrified boys aged, 13, 14, and 15 with a kitchen knife.

Oh, how easily this could have been written as another ‘disability hate crime’…

Yesterday, Basildon Crown Court heard on January 14, McGrath was agitated because some other youths had been throwing things at his house in Melville Drive, Wickford.

He went berserk when he saw three boys walking past, wrongly assuming they were the children responsible for throwing the objects.

McGrath shouted “I’m going to get a blade” at the boys, then armed himself with a seven-to-nine-inch bladed kitchen knife chased them.

Is this a case of persistent winding-up of the local oddball by the local scum?

Certainly seems to be:

His lawyer, Stephen Rose, told Judge Ian Graham: “He had been angered by a number of youths and was at his wits’ end.

“He had phoned police on three occasions about this.

“The defendant has to take responsibility in that his behaviour was inappropriate and was a flagrant breach of his antisocial behaviour order.”

Wait, what?

His antisocial behaviour order? Why, yes:

In 2007, McGrath, a private music teacher by profession, was given a ten-year antisocial behaviour order banning him from acting in any way which would distress or alarm people living near him.

It included bizarre conditions was a ban on wearing a sinister black balaclava which he had been known to wear to intimidate neighbours.

He has breached the order before and in July last year, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence after calling female neighbours “paedophiles and lesbians”.

Ah. Clearly, it’s a case of six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other, yet again….

Judge Graham gave McGrath a 12-month community and supervision order and said he had to submit to a 12-month mental health treatment programme.

He added: “I accept you have been having quite a bit of harassment yourself, but what you should not have done is go running into the street with a knife.

“Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but the danger of going out into the street with a knife is that somebody will get seriously hurt – and it could be you.”

But like that fabled lottery win, it almost certainly won't be; it'll be someone who doesn't deserve it....