An angry customer threatened a shop worker with an axe after a dispute over a faulty mattress.
Christopher Woo also shattered a mirror and broke a table during the incident at Worldwide Furniture earlier this year. He left the worker terrified and caused more than £1,000 of damage to the Walton Road business.
A judge told Woo he couldn’t just “take the law into your own hands” as he jailed him earlier this week. Joanne Moore, prosecuting, said Woo had bought a mattress from the shop weeks before but had found it had a defect. He then contacted the shop to replace it but that had not yet happened.
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When he went into the shop on April 4 he saw Colin White inside. Mr White normally worked in the business’ warehouse but was on the shop floor due to staff shortages.
Woo approached him and asked about fixing or replacing the mattress. Mr White recognised him and told him the replacement had not yet been sorted but said he would try to find out when it could happen, to which Woo replied: “Do you think I’m f***ing stupid?”
He walked out the shop, picking up a smaller item near the door and throwing it to the floor. Ms Moore said Woo then turned to Mr White and said: “If someone doesn’t get in touch with me by the end of the day I will do some damage - and it won’t be me it will be someone else who will do it.”
After Woo was gone, Mr White tried to ring a colleague to figure out what was preventing the mattress from being replaced but before he could find out Woo returned. She said: “He was carrying with him an axe and the defendant then said to him ‘Are you sorting it now’?”
Mr White said Woo had raised the axe above his head and started to threaten him, though he later told police he was in such a state of shock he couldn’t remember everything he said. Woo then swung the axe downwards through a table and also damaged a mirror before leaving the shop.
He was later arrested and admitted criminal damage, threatening behaviour, common assault and possession of a bladed article in a public place.
Woo had bought the mattress for his daughter, who has complex health issues, and David Woods, defending, said he was stressed about sorting the issue before acting in a completely unacceptable way. He added that Woo had not taken the axe to the shop with the intent of threatening someone but was instead moving his tools from his home at the time.
Mr Woods also conceded that, in interviews with probation officers, Woo minimised the extent of what he had done and showed little remorse. Judge Robert Trevor-Jones said “people cannot simply take the law into their own hands” and added that Woo’s interviews with probation reinforced to him that he needed to go to jail.
He said: “The authors of that report point to an entrenched and somewhat inflated sense of self worth and you tend to dismiss allegations that you have behaved wrongly.” Woo, of Chatsworth Avenue, was jailed for 16 months.
