A MAN who was spotted walking down the street while carrying a baseball bat has been sent to prison.

Robert Croughton avoided an immediate jail sentence in February last year after attempting to force his way into an innocent woman’s flat while brandishing a knife, as well being involved in a brawl outside a nightclub.

But the 40-year-old is now behind bars after magistrates deemed that it was not unjust to send him to custody for his behaviour.

Croughton appeared to be sentenced at Warrington Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday after being charged with possession of an offensive weapon in a public place and breach of a suspended sentence.

The court heard how police were called to Dallam Lane on Friday, July 1, after receiving reports of a person in possession of a baseball bat.

After attending the road, which runs alongside the Halliwell Jones Stadium and Tesco Extra, at 10.15pm, they arrested the defendant.

This placed him in breach of his sentence of 13 weeks in prison suspended for 18 months handed down by the same court in February last year.

This was for two public order offences and criminal damage.

That hearing heard how a woman was woken by a disturbance outside her apartment on Alder Lane in Orford at around 7.30am on a Saturday a month earlier.

Shortly afterwards, the defendant began violently banging on the door to her home with force, and when she looked through the peephole, she saw four males standing outside, one of which was shirtless and had his face covered with blood.

He then shouted ‘I’ll kill you’ while holding a kitchen knife in his hand, having been drinking with friends in his own flat in the hours previous.

The court heard that his attack was a case of mistaken identity, and that the armed forces veteran had got the wrong address after believing that another occupant of the block was responsible for assaulting him in the street minutes earlier.

At the time of the incident, Croughton was under investigation over assaults on two men outside PJs bar on Bridge Street in November 2019.

He had initially attempted to act as a peacemaker after the pair were refused entry to the club in the early hours.

But the situation escalated and he ended up punching both and continuing his attack, which was caught on CCTV, after they had fallen to the floor.

Chair magistrate Andrew Brothers took the defendant’s guilty pleas into account for both possessing the baseball bat and breaching his order.

However, he remarked that the weapon possession offence was ‘so serious’ that it alone warranted a custodial sentence.

The suspended sentence order was also revoked and replaced with a prison sentence.

Croughton, of Folly Farm Close in Bewsey, was sentenced to 10 weeks in prison and ordered to pay a total of £239 in court costs.

Magistrates approved an order to deprive the defendant of the baseball bat.