By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
AN ICE-addict who persistently breached intervention orders has been jailed for 14 months to “push the reset button”.
Police observed the 27-year-old man wrestling with an ex-partner as she attempted to jump from a footbridge in Endeavour Hills on 15 February, a court was told.
The man had been barred from any contact with the victim – including going within 200 metres of her home – for five years from January 2015.
He had only been released from jail for the same breaches less than two weeks before the incident.
A defence lawyer told Dandenong Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday 16 May the man was trying to stop the victim from jumping.
Magistrate Jack Vandersteen pondered on how the pair started arguing, what they were arguing about and how that led to the incident.
On 17 April, the accused wrestled for five minutes with four police officers who tried to remove him from his mother’s Beaconsfield house – also the subject of an intervention order.
Drug affected, he resisted treatment from an ambulance officer. The man could not be interviewed due to his “state of mind”, police prosecutor Senior Constable Dani Lord told the court.
On 16 April, police were called to the pair arguing while seemingly drug-affected in a Narre Warren street.
On another occasion, the couple were discovered in the bed of the man’s mother.
By the end of April, the man had moved in with the ex-partner at her parents’ home in Tooradin North.
The father claimed he had kicked the couple out after being assaulted by his daughter and threatened by the accused.
The man’s lawyer said there was no suggestion of violence against the mother and ex-partner, in contrast to previous offences.
“A number of these matters are unusual in that … they are by consensual agreement.”
The man had used heroin in the past six months, ice and GHB since he was 18.
The start of his drug abuse co-incided with a diagnosed bipolar disorder and the death of his father from cancer.
“That was the time when things seemed to go wrong,” the lawyer said.
The accused had endured recent periods of homelessness, and been unemployed for several years
At the 16 May hearing, Magistrate Vandersteen noted the man had been jailed for four months twice last year for the “same offending”, as well as 77 days in 2013.
He said the victims had to be protected from potential family violence.
“The difficulty is because of the combination of drug use, mental health and homelessness, it increases the chances of him breaching court orders substantially.
“He’s not going to be able to comply with a community corrections order. He hasn’t previously.
“This pushes the reset button.”
The man will be eligible for parole in five months.
