A father who threatened to cut off a teenage boy’s ears with a machete has been spared jail this week.
Nathan Lockey, was tooled up with a 60cm long blade, after arriving at the house of a teenager accused of bullying his daughter at school.
The 31-year-old dad lost his temper when the teenager’s older brother said he wasn’t in, shouting: “Get him here! He’s bullying my daughter. I’ll cut off his ears.”
Lockey, drove to the schoolboy’s house on February 13, after his ex-partner called him to say their daughter was very upset after the boy would not stop tormenting her.
At court this week it was revealed that the older brother tried to calm Lockey down and offered to help sort the situation out.
But Lockey informed him: “I’m not here to talk, I’m here for blood. I’ll burn this house down.”
Neighbours had come out to see what was going on and this aggravated Lockey further. The dad from Vicarage Street, Stockton, told them: “If I come back I’ll kill you all. This is not race-related.”
In a statement to Teesside Crown Court the older brother said he was, ‘terrified that Lockey would carry out his threats’.
The brother later found derogatory posts on social media that his younger brother had written about Lockey’s daughter.
Police pulled Lockey over in his car later that day, and found the machete, according to a report in Teeside Live.
He told officers, “nobody threatens my daughter. I’ll cut him from ear to ear”.
Defence barrister Jonathan Walker said his client’s teenage daughter had been bullied by the boy for more than four years and Lockey and his ex-partner had done everything they could to stop it.
Initially the boy had asked Lockey’s daughter for a relationship and when she declined, the bullying began.
Judge Peter Makepeace told Lockey that the fact that he had no previous criminal record and had been on bail for months, without further incident, had saved him from being sent to prison.
Handing Lockey a 12 month prison term, suspended for 18 months, he told him that a condition of the suspended sentence was not to go into the boy’s street for 18 months, adding, ‘you tried to deal with the bullying by being a bully yourself’.
