A parking enforcement officer lost his temper when his wife offered to do a good deed for an ill neighbour.
Inverness Sheriff Court heard yesterday that 46-year-old former soldier Darren Reid and his auxiliary nurse wife Catherine, 50, had argued about several things including finances and mowing the grass of a man next door.
But Reid’s trial heard that he was “towering over her” as she sat on a sofa eating a bowl of pasta at home in St Valery Avenue, Inverness, on August 21.
Through frequent tearful outbursts, she told Sheriff Gordon Fleetwood: “We had fallen out a lot and when I said I was going to help an ill neighbour cut his grass, he began raging at me.
“Then his right fist walloped me on the nose. He left the room but came back and the look on his face was ‘what have I done?’.
“I was shouting at him to get away from me and screaming for help. I was bleeding from my nose. I went outside and neighbours came and I felt safe that I was all over.”
She rejected a defence suggestion by Reid’s solicitor advocate Mike Chapman that she had been struck by the bowl of food when his client swept it out of her hand.
One of her neighbours who came to her assistance was 73-year-old June Fraser. She told the court: “Cath came running out of the house and her face was covered in blood.”
Reid, who denied assaulting his wife, said: “I didn’t intend to injure her. I only swiped the bowl out of her hand out of frustration when she made derogatory remarks about my family.”
Finding him guilty, Sheriff Fleetwood fined Reid £400.
