Thug told officer: I’ll choke the last breath out of you
A POLICEWOMAN battered by a thug last night recalled the moment he told her: “I’m going to choke your last breath out of you.”.
PC Alison Laughlan was hit around the head at least 30 times which left her unable to hold her baby until she had fully recovered.
Yesterday, Adam McManus – who had previously been convicted of leaving a man brain-damaged in 2008 – was told he was lucky not to face a murder charge.
Rangers football fan McManus was annoyed by his side’s 2-1 defeat to Celtic and, fuelled by alcohol, became embroiled in a fight with two men in Renfrewshire last March. PC Laughlan and her colleague, PC Vincent Coppola, tried to restrain the 26-year-old construction worker.
They used an incapacitant spray but he spat it back in PC Laughlan’s face. She put a handcuff on one of McManus’s arms but he still knocked a colleague back.
PC Laughlan said: “The next thing I felt was my head getting bashed from side to side because he just kept hitting. I remember screaming and kind of stumbling. He just wouldn’t stop. I just thought that I wasn’t getting out of this, not conscious anyway. He must have hit me between 20 and 30 times. I was also winded when his hand hit me just under my right rib cage.”
McManus then charged at another officer “like a wild man” during the incident in Johnstone. She said it took seven in total to get him on the ground, spitting all over her and a colleague. When in the back of a police van, he told officers: “I’m going to ******* kill you. I’m going to choke your last breath out of you.”
PC Laughlan, who has served with Police Scotland for almost eight years, was hospitalised with concussion and severe bruising to her face, neck and ribs.
She was unable to hold her eight-month-old daughter. “She was trying to grab on to me and touch my face but I just burst into tears because the side of my jaw and my nose was really sensitive from being hit. After we had sat for a bit, I tried to pick her up a little later and the weight of her just crippled my ribs completely,” she said. The officer said she has become worried on such calls “whether it’s going to boil over and if the same thing was going to happen again. It’s amazing how one person can totally change you”.
PC Laughlan has since been nominated for a bravery award.
Yesterday, McManus was jailed for three years and nine months at Paisley Sheriff Court after admitting four charges including the assault to severe injury of the female officer.
Sentencing him, Sheriff Colin Pettigrew told McManus: “Blows to the head, whether by punch or kick, can, unfortunately, be fatal. That it was not, on this occasion, was fortunate but you gave no thought to that.
“When the police arrived, your behaviour did not stop – if anything, it escalated.”
‘I tried to pick up my baby but she crippled my ribs’