An Army veteran who previously completed a charity bike ride from Aberdeen to Arbroath has been found guilty of attacking his pregnant partner.
Sammy Stewart raised more than £3,000 last year for the Storm Arwen-damaged Arbroath Animal Rescue Centre, where he got his dog Buddy.
Earlier this week, a court heard that the 36-year-old choked a woman on two occasions in 2017.
He also grabbed her hair and tried to pull her out of a car while she was heavily pregnant.
Stewart had denied the assaults but was found guilty, following a day-long trial at Aberdeen Sheriff Court.
In the first incident, at his then-partner’s address in Kemnay on May 20 2017, Stewart grabbed her by the throat and pulled her hair, after an evening in the pub.
Taking to the witness stand, the woman told the court she had asked Stewart to leave the address when the incident happened.
She said: “He didn’t like me telling him to leave, to the extent I had my hair pulled and he grabbed my throat.
“It was that tight, I couldn’t actually breathe, but it lasted seconds before he let go.”
She described being pinned against a door frame by her throat, and her son – who was 15 at the time – coming downstairs and screaming at Stewart to leave.
Grabbed woman by hair and throat
In a second incident outside Kemnay Golf Club, on November 4 2017, Stewart again grabbed the woman by the hair and throat – this time while she was pregnant – and forcibly removed her from her vehicle.
The woman told the court she had gone out looking for her partner after he failed to meet her at a bingo hall on his return from a football match in Edinburgh.
She said her friend had gone into the bar at the golf club to look for Stewart while she remained in the doorway.
The friend, who also gave evidence, said she found Stewart, who then asked her not to tell his partner where he was.
But she pointed to the woman who was in the doorway and had already seen him.
All three then walked outside and the women got into Stewart’s partner’s car to drive off.
Stewart’s then-partner told the court he would not let her close the car door, so, she threw his spare house key across the car park, in the hope that he would go look for it.
“That just seemed to make things worse”, she said.
‘I couldn’t breathe’
The victim added: “He didn’t go for the key. He decided to go for my hair and choke me into my seat by my throat, so I couldn’t breathe. He pulled me by my hair out of the car”.
Asked by fiscal depute Victoria Kerr how the incidents had affected her, the woman said she had been left “mentally damaged”.
She explained: “The physical scars were few and far between but the mental scars are still there”.
The woman wept in the witness stand and added: “He passed a lot of the blame onto me and made out like it was my fault it happened.
“He made me feel like a terrible person because he had PTSD from the Army and I was the worst person in the world because I didn’t understand.”
Stewart also gave evidence during the trial at Aberdeen Sheriff Court.
Under questioning from his solicitor Laura Grace, Stewart denied choking or pulling his partner’s hair in May 2017.
But he accepted that he had “nudged” her at the top of her chest, below her neck.
He claimed she had come towards him and added: “I placed my hand firmly out”.
Asked why, he replied: “I don’t know. I can’t give you an explanation why”.
Speaking about the second incident in the golf club car park, Stewart denied choking the woman, pulling her hair and forcing her out of the car.
Instead, he insisted that he had just been reaching for his spare key in the centre console.
He added: “My right arm was reaching over the top of her to get my key and my left arm was across her so that I could get in”.
Guilty of both charges
Sheriff Janys Scott KC said she had “no particular difficulty in disbelieving” Stewart in respect of the second incident, particularly.
She found Stewart, now of Kingswell Terrace in Perth, guilty of both charges of assault.
Stewart’s sentencing was deferred until April to allow time for reports to be carried out.
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