News / Ran into the road
A THIRTY year old scrap metal worker who ran out into the road in front of a moving car in Lerwick has been fined and given a community payback order.
Sebastian Wrzos, 30, of Port Arthur, Scalloway, admitted “culpably and recklessly” running out in front of the vehicle, which swerved but was unable to avoid a collision.
Wrzos sustained minor cuts and bruises in the incident on the town’s Holmsgarth Road on 21 December last year, Lerwick Sheriff Court heard on Wednesday.
Procurator fiscal Duncan Mackenzie said the incident took place at 6pm on a Saturday. Wrzos was standing by the side of the road and made eye contact with the car driver before running into the road “without warning” with his arms outstretched as if he was trying to stop the car.
Mackenzie said a four year old girl was travelling as a passenger in the car and “to say she was traumatised is an understatement”.
Defence agent Tommy Allan said Wrzos had been out the night before the incident and had “taken a lot of drink”. He had been in Lerwick for two or three pints the following afternoon and could remember waiting to catch the bus home.
Allan said his client had been unable to explain precisely why he had gone into the road, but Wrzos “knows it was a particularly stupid thing to do”.
Sheriff Philip Mann said his actions in causing the car to swerve had the potential to have caused serious injuries to bystanders and other motorists.
Wrzos’s “crass stupidity” was probably the result of overindulging in alcohol, the sheriff said. He fined him £300 and imposed a community payback order of 70 hours’ unpaid work.
Sheriff Mann warned Wrzos that he had accumulated “quite a number” of convictions in the past few years, and if he appeared before him again he “could be looking at a custodial sentence”.
Meanwhile a man who admitted supplying cannabis between 30 November and 3 December 2012 has been warned jail is a possibility.
Sheriff Mann deferred sentence on Lindsay Brown, 36, of Glenhaven, Hamnavoe after he pleaded guilty to supplying the class B drug at Harrison Square and Scalloway Road in Lerwick, and elsewhere in Shetland.
Mackenzie said police had caught Brown with 128 grams of cannabis resin in his possession, colloquially known as a “half bar” with a value of £175. If cut down into smaller amounts, it could have been worth around £650, the fiscal said.
Brown admitted his involvement in what Mackenzie described as “a social supply as opposed to a commercial supply”.
Defence agent Keith Bovey said that, while he wasn’t seeking to minimise the gravity of the offence, “we’re not talking about kilos or thousands of pounds” of the drug.
He said Brown was a hard worker employed seven days a week, 12 hours a day working on decommissioning oil rigs.
Sheriff Mann deferred sentence until 1 October for a criminal justice social inquiry report. He said it was “only fair to indicate I will be considering a custodial sentence” due to a previous conviction, although that was “not inevitable”.
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