Man jailed for kicking his girlfriend’s head
Logistics boss gets three years for vicious assault
A man who left his girlfriend with a fractured eye socket after kicking her head “like a football” was yesterday (Tuesday) jailed for three years at Stirling Sheriff Court.
Logistics boss Colin Wilson, 39, was condemned by Sheriff David Mackie for continuing Danielle Aitken’s torment by calling her a liar in court.
Wilson grabbed health spa worker Ms Aitken (37) by her hair in the house in Bridge of Allan’s Kenilworth Road she was at that time renting.
They had earlier been in a Bridge of Allan pub watching the Calcutta Cup game between England and Scotland on February 7 last year.
He rained kicks and punches on her head and body as she tried to curl into a ball .
Wilson, of Saline, Fife, denied assaulting Ms Aitken to her severe injury but was found guilty following a three-day trial before a jury.
Sheriff David Mackie told him: “It is difficult to envisage a more serious matter coming before this court.
“The community’s abhorrence of such offending and the seriousness of it can only be reflected by a significant custodial sentence.”
“In addition to the three-year prison sentence, he imposed a 12 month post-release supervision order on the first offender, and a non-harassment order forbidding him from contacting Ms Aitken in any way for five years.
The sheriff said: “Just back from a recent holiday, and having enjoyed the afternoon and evening in a local pub around the rugby, really out of nowhere, unprovoked, and for no justifiable reason whatsoever, you inflicted what can only be described as an appalling assault, grabbing your partner by the hair, punching her to the head, putting her to the ground and then repeatedly kicking her head, graphically described by her as if kicking a football with maximum force.
force indeed, because she sustained a fractured eye socket, a fractured finger, and extensive bruising.”
The sheriff said that Wilson had held “a quite responsible managerial position” and had no history of offending, but such mitigating factors were counterbalanced by the fact that he had “maintained a state of denial” about the crime.
He said: “You might simply have put the Crown to the proof of the facts of this case, but you went further, and gave evidence suggesting that your former partner was to blame for her own injuries by virtue of extreme drunkenness.
“On the basis of the account you gave and the position you adopted, your solicitor was obliged to subject her to crossexamination in the course of which it was alleged that she was a liar and was fabricating.
“In the context of domestic abuse, which this is, such an approach has an effect of reinforcing, if not continuing, the abuse, and the account that you offered was unanimously rejected by the jury.”
He told Wilson his conduct had been “inexcusable.”
During the trial, Miss Aitken told the court Wilson, whom she had met while working at a spa at the Airth Castle Hotel and Spa near Falkirk, had seemed normal as they drank and watched the rugby.
They walked home arm“Maximum in-arm about midnight to her house where his attitude changed, and he grabbed her phone out of her handbag and started to look through it before launching the savage attack on her.
Wilson claimed she had injured herself by falling down drunk on concrete steps.