Kit PetersLLANELLI: Woman jailed after knife attack and strangling of friend she was due to go on holiday with
A Llanelli woman has been jailed for three and a half years after a drug-fuelled knife attack on a friend she had known since their school days.
Elizabeth Jones, 26, of Park View, Llanelli, was found hiding in a cupboard after the assault, which left her victim needing hospital treatment, Swansea Crown Court heard.
South Wales Police said the attack came at the end of several days in which Jones had been using crack cocaine.
The court heard the two women had been friends for years and had been due to go on holiday together when Jones turned on her at a house in Pontarddulais.
Jones armed herself with a kitchen knife, smashed a glass coffee table and threw glasses at the woman before dragging her by the hair and threatening to kill her, the court heard.
She then grabbed her friend by the throat and strangled her to the point where she struggled to breathe, the court heard.
The victim was able to flee after a neighbour, hearing the disturbance, knocked at the door to check she was alright.
She was treated at Morriston Hospital for cuts to her ear and leg, grazes, marks to her neck and soft tissue damage to her face.
In a statement read to the court, the woman said she had been left with panic attacks, nightmares and difficulty sleeping, and had since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
She said her home had been left looking “like a murder scene” and that she no longer felt safe there.
When officers found Jones hiding under a pile of clothes in a cupboard, she was aggressive towards them, and she went on to assault a police constable.
Jones admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm, making threats to kill, intentional strangulation, criminal damage and assaulting a constable.
The court heard she had 16 previous convictions for 22 offences, including harassment, battery and criminal damage.
Defending, Matt Murphy said Jones had a “deeply troubled background” that had led to drug misuse and offending, that her time on remand had been her first experience of custody, and that she had a supportive family.
Judge Paul Thomas KC said that for reasons never properly explained, Jones had lost her temper “in a quite startling way,” and that while the victim’s physical wounds would heal, “the psychological impact may take a great deal longer to be resolved.”
Detective Sergeant James Llewellyn, of South Wales Police, said Jones’s offending had been “chaotic and out of control” and had come after days of using Class A drugs.
He said it was unlikely any of it would have happened had she not been under the influence — and that she would now be “ruing” the decision, having lost years of her freedom.
Jones will serve up to half of her three-and-a-half-year sentence in custody before being released on licence.
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