Knife crime campaigner cleared of assault on ex-partner
AKNIFE crime campaigner from Runcorn has been cleared of domestic assault over claims he punched and threw a plastic box at an ex-partner.
Louis Alex Bamber, 24, of Bridgewater Street, wept as he was found not guilty on both counts on Friday following a short trial lasting several hours at North Cheshire Magistrates’ Court in Warrington.
Paul Chadwick, presiding magistrate, said the case against him was “not credible”.
Mr Bamber was charged earlier this year with two counts of Section 39 assault by beating following allegations made by his then partner Connor McCarthy, 23, who had moved in with him at his house in Runcorn.
They offered differing accounts of what happened.
Mr McCarthy was first to give evidence, via videolink from Northern Ireland.
He said the threemonth relationship had been “good but went downhill”.
Under examination from prosecutor Lynne Sayers, he said that on February 26 Mr Bamber returned home “in a bad mood” and told Mr McCarthy he “hadn’t cleaned the house properly to his standard”.
Tensions continued, and Mr McCarthy said Mr Bamber threw a “weed box” at him, hitting his upper left arm on a spot where there was already a bruise from a separate, unconnected incident.
He told the court he was “scared” and Mr Bamber told him “make me a joint now”.
Two days later Mr Bamber would tell police in interview that it might have been from during being physically intimate.
In relation to the second allegation from Thursday, February 27, Mr McCarthy said Mr Bamber returned home at around 4.30pm and told him he smelled and needed a shower.
After he showered they set off to walk to a shop, and he said Mr Bamber told him he had been “annoying” Mr Bamber “non-stop” for a few days and told him not to come back to the house.
Mr Bamber then went to a different shop and Mr McCarthy rang his mother in Northern Ireland, who told him to go to the house to “get my stuff” so he went home and started packing.
While packing, Mr Bamber tried to persuade Mr McCarthy to stay, and the situation worsened when Mr Bamber discovered Mr McCarthy’s brother had called him a “domestic abuser” in the comments section of a post he had shared from Merseyside Police relating to his anti-knife crime work, prompting Mr Bamber to tell Mr McCarthy to tell his brother to take it down.
Mr McCarthy told the court Mr Bamber shouted at him and his face turned “red with anger”.
The complainant said he was sat on the bed on the phone to his mother and Mr Bamber punched him with a left fist to the right hand side of the head “with full force”.
Mr McCarthy said he didn’t look in a mirror but said a police officer told him it had caused reddening to the forehead.
A police statement cited by Ms Sayers said the police officer who spoke to Mr McCarthy had recorded that he could not see any injury to his forehead “at this point”.
Mr Bamber said he was right handed – in contrast to a left-handed punch.
He also made counterclaims, namely that Mr McCarthy had been “roaring” and had thrown a phone at him, but it missed and hit a wall.
The knife crime campaigner told the court his group Live Your Life Drop The Knife, which he set up two years ago “after a friend was murdered” and which had “reduced knife crime in Runcorn by 20%”, had just reached a deal with Merseyside Police to expand its youth work into Merseyside from Halton.
Liam Ferris, defending
Mr Bamber, said there was no evidence of any injury from the alleged punch beyond Mr McCarthy’s account, nor from the alleged box-throwing incident.
Mr Bamber, giving evidence in person, said he didn’t own any such box and police hadn’t found one when searching the property.
He said he didn’t know why Mr McCarthy had made the claims against him, and under cross examination from Ms Sayers, repeatedly insisted the allegations were “not true”.
Mr Ferris probed Mr McCarthy on the issue of a Papa John’s pizza order they made on that same date of February 26, and asked Mr McCarthy whether he remembered anything “significant” about it.
Mr McCarthy replied “no” and “I don’t think so”.
This was at odds with Mr Bamber’s account, and he told the court the Runcorn Papa John’s had just opened and they had to wait four-and-a-half hours for the pizza delivery – which Mr McCarthy denied.
Mr Ferris said Mr McCarthy’s evidence in court that he was sitting on the bed was at odds with his statement to the police, in which he was “lying” on the bed – which the complainant said he did not remember saying.
Mr Bamber conceded he had raised the issue of Mr McCarthy smelling, but said he thought they were at a stage in the relationship where they could raise such issues as “adults”.
Mr McCarthy accepted they had been arguing and “shouting at each other”.
In a similar way, Mr Bamber accepted he had told Mr McCarthy not to return to the house with “that attitude” while on the way to the shop, and wanted him to talk like an “adult” – although Ms Sayers accused him of being “bossy”.
In his closing speech, Mr Ferris said Mr McCarthy had been reluctant to demonstrate how the alleged box was allegedly thrown.
He said to conclude an offence had occurred on the word of a “single witness” would be “thin in the extreme”.
Mr Ferris added that Mr McCarthy had not called the police; but a relative in Northern Ireland had.
The court clerk read a good character direction saying Mr Bamber had no previous convictions to the magistrate panel before it retired briefly to deliberate.
Paul Chadwick, presiding, found Mr Bamber not guilty on both counts, and the case was dismissed.
Summing up, he said Mr Bamber’s evidence was “consistent and believable”, whereas the complainant’s “version of events was not credible”.
He said: “An example of this is we would have expected there to be more injuries if the event had panned out as he had detailed.”
Mr Bamber set up the Live Your Life – Drop The Knife campaign in 2018 following the murder of 18-year-old Eddie O’Rourke from Runcorn.