A WOMAN has been jailed for six months for a series of attacks against 999 staff and other people trying to help her.
Melanie Jane Small, 35, threw herself down a railway embankment off Grosvenor Terrace, Clifton, York, when a police officer tried to stop her hurting herself, said Cathy Turnbull, prosecuting.
She was so aggressive towards paramedics and police as they tried to get her back to safety, she had to be tied to a stretcher and lifted back to the road by a fire service crane. As she was being escorted to hospital, she spat at a nurse trying to give her medical treatment, York Magistrates' Court heard.
In other incidents, she head-butted a police officer trying to arrest her for shoplifting, threatened to slit a hostel employee’s throat before slamming her several times against a doorway, and shortly afterwards was caught on Pavement with two butter knives. She had also grabbed a complete stranger’s arm in the doorway of a restaurant in Petergate and tried to drag her away, and damaged the door of a doctor’s surgery.
Senior magistrate Deborah Chipps, sitting with two colleagues, said: “Paramedics, police, fire services and nurses don’t go to work every day to be abused by those people they are trying to help.”
Small’s solicitor Adam Henry said: “This isn’t the behaviour of someone who is normal. It is the behaviour of someone who is ill and suffering from mental health problems.”
Small, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer, three more assaults, two charges of possessing knives, one of stealing clothes from Primark in Coppergate, one of handling a coat stolen from Dorothy Perkins, and two of criminal damage.
She was ordered to pay £410 compensation in addition to the six-month prison sentence.