Police attended the scene after Andrew Walsh-Thompson stabbed his ex's new partner in the neck with knife at Coastland Takeaways, and then took off on foot. Photo / Carmen Hall
A man was so enraged his ex-girlfriend had moved on with a man he didn’t like, he followed her and her new partner into a fish and chip shop and stabbed the man in the neck with a knife.
Andrew Walsh-Thompson had been out of prison for a month, following a sentence on other violence charges, when things “boiled over” and he lost control.
The Crown said he delivered a “frenzied and uncontrolled” attack, which involved “11 striking movements towards the [victim’s] neck, head and face area”.
Today, the 36-year-old was sentenced to prison in the Tauranga District Court on a charge of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Walsh-Thompson had been in the Pāpāmoa area near where his ex-partner and the victim were living when he followed them into Coastland Takeaways on March 14, armed with a knife. He approached the victim from behind as he stood at the counter.
The victim tried to defend himself by punching Walsh-Thompson, and covering his neck with a hooded sweatshirt he had draped around his shoulders.
After the attack, which lasted about 15 seconds from the time Walsh-Thompson entered the shop to the point at which he left, he took off along Pāpāmoa Beach Rd, throwing the knife away as he ran.
A short time later Walsh-Thompson handed himself in to police.
The victim suffered two wounds - a deep cut on the left side of his neck, about 2cm to 3cm deep that needed four stitches, and a gash to his chin which needed six stitches.
The victim lost a litre of blood and was admitted to intensive care to have a drain put into his neck to stop blood from entering his airway.
At the sentencing hearing, Crown prosecutor Laura Clay said it was an “element of good luck” that not all the strikes had connected.
She said the incident was unprovoked and targeted, with Walsh-Thompson coming into a public place already armed with a knife.
She said it was “another element of good luck” that the injuries the victim did sustain had not been more serious.
Defence lawyer David Bates said Walsh-Thompson maintained he’d been holding the blade in a “reverse position”, so that the blunt end of the handle was pointing towards the end of his fingers, and the blade pointing towards his elbow.
With his initial strikes, he hadn’t been intending to use the point of the knife, Bates said.
“He believes that while he was making these striking motions towards the victim, and the knife was in his hand in the reverse position, somehow during one of strikes ... it caught on his hoodie or his jacket to move [the blade] into a different position.”
“When one applies common sense, if this defendant had been using the knife with the point of the knife aimed at the victim each time a strike was made, one would have expected not only two wounds but many more...,” Bates said.
Walsh-Thompson provided letters and written notes to the court ahead of his sentencing, explaining what had led to the incident and his feelings about it since.
His lawyer said he accepted that it had been the “wrong thing to do”.
“You’ll see through the notes he has written that over time, his emotional stress and trauma has accumulated, to the point where it boiled over. He’s got out of prison and he’s lost control of his ability to properly manage the situation.”
Walsh-Thompson didn’t like that the victim was now with his ex-partner, nor how he was treating his children.
He’d previously been in a relationship with the woman for eight years, and she had started a relationship with the victim while Walsh-Thompson was in prison.
Bates said his client knew he would be going back to prison, but the question was for how long.
“He’s just hopeful that when he comes out of prison he can manage much better.”
In sentencing, Judge Melinda Mason began with a starting point of eight years, before applying a discount of 25% for his early guilty plea, as well as a further 5% for an element of remorse.
But she noted that while he was remorseful for the offending, it seemed he still carried “hatred” towards the victim.
However, while on remand, he’d done every rehabilitation course available, including one that taught self-regulation.
“I can see that you really want to make changes. You want to change the way that you deal with confronting issues for you,” Judge Mason said.
She referred to his background issues, including the physical abuse and parental neglect he’d suffered as a child, and his early exit from education.
He’d also had issues from a very young age around drugs and alcohol.
She applied a 10% discount for background factors.
The judge then added an uplift of three months for his recent violent offending, which resulted in an end sentence of four years’ and seven months’ imprisonment.
As Walsh-Thompson left the dock, he became emotional.
“Can I just say that, you know, the way they released me from prison, it was a setup to fail from the start. If they hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have ever f***ing been in this s***.”
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
A disregard for authority could be why those attending court are thumbing their noses.