A bottle shop worker was terrifyingly attacked with a hatchet, after a Ballarat tradie turned violent when he was confronted for stealing cans of Jim Beam.
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Joshua Mcintosh, aged 22, pleaded guilty in the Ballarat Magistrates' Court on Tuesday, September 12, 2023, to two charges relating to the attack and narrowly avoided a jail sentence.
According to a police summary, on October 21, 2021, Mcinotsh and a co-accused entered an IGA in the Melbourne suburb of Abbotsford, where he proceeded to hide multiple cans of Jim Beam on his person.
When confronted by the store manager, Mcintosh pushed them in the chest and told them to "get the f*** away from me."
He then threatened another staff member, before taking the cans of Jim Beam and leaving the shop with the co-accused.
The staff member followed Mcintosh down the street, but when they confronted him, he pulled a small blunt axe from his pocket and struck the worker.
The staff member was left with a mark to their chest following the attack.
Police attended the scene where they found sunglasses, hat and a hatchet cover belonging to the accused, who was later identified via a DNA swab taken from the sunglasses in November, 2022.
Mcintosh was arrested in February, 2023.
Defence counsel for Mcintosh said he experienced a traumatic childhood following the separation of his parents, and was affected by a violent assault in 2021.
Mcintosh, who is living in Ballarat Central, has found stable employment as a bricklayer since being released from prison for unrelated matters in August.
His lawyer said he had struggled with alcohol and ice use which had contributed to his behaviour at the time of the attack.
But, the lawyer said he had been clean for the past four months, as he had been motivated to change following the birth of his son.
Magistrate Mark Stratmann said the offending was "dramatically escalated" because Mcintosh pulled a weapon on the store clerk.
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"This is the type of offending which contemplates a jail term," he said.
Magistrate Stratmann sentenced Mcintosh to an 18 month Community Corrections Order, where he must complete 120 hours of community work.
"The community will not accept people behaving like this, if you break this order and come back before me you'll have a 99 per cent chance of going back to prison," he said to the 22-year-old.
"If you're not going to do it for yourself, do it for your baby."
"You're a very young man, please don't ignore what I'm saying to you, people regularly go to jail for this kind of offending, and not just for a few months."
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