A gardener who left a man within ‘1cm from death’ after attacking him with an axe has been jailed for 24 years.
David Perry was kicked out of the 16th century Bell Hotel in Clare, Suffolk, as he became aggressive towards a group.
Instead of heading home, the 40-year-old grabbed the weapon from his truck and returned inside.
Ipswich Crown Court was told how Perry ‘took the axe, wielding it over your right shoulder with both hands, landing it into the head of Matthew Cutts’ on March 19 last year.
He fell to the ground and suffered a deep cut in his skull, but managed to make a ‘rapid recovery following surgery’.
Judge Martyn Levett said if the axe had struck 1cm away, on a thinner section of the victim’s skull, then he was ‘sure there would have been some permanent brain injury or death’.
As a result of the attack, the dad-of-three ‘still struggles to find words’ and it ‘gets worse when he gets tired’.
Perry, who had been drinking that night, then fled the pub and drove around for several hours before going into a shop and telling a worker about what had happened.
Carolyn Gardiner, prosecuting, said Mr Cutts, who was 37 at the time of the attack, was off work, and is now back but only working part-time.
He lost his driving licence and some of his independence, and no longer can play golf, go fishing or to the gym, the judge said.
Claire Matthews, mitigating, said Perry’s ‘actions that night amounted to a red mist descending’.
‘He didn’t go into the pub that night intending on causing anyone trouble but he disproportionately reacted to a situation that arose,’ she said.
‘It was that outburst of rage that he has regretted and felt shame for ever since.’
Perry, of St Margarets Place, Stradishall, Suffolk, denied attempted murder but was found guilty following an earlier trial.
He had admitted wounding with intent and to possessing an offensive weapon in a public place.
The judge sentenced him to 24 years behind bars, and also made him subject of a restraining order not to contact any member of the Cutts family, and ordered that the axe be destroyed.
