A 30-year-old from Sheffield, England, was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday after beating his neighbor to death for insulting him with a bag full of Pokémon cards and a wooden board.
“It was a relentless and reckless attack on one of your neighbors where during the brutal attack you made the decision to kill him,” Judge Sarah Wright reportedly said at the sentencing hearing. reported The Independent on Thursday.
Last August, 31-year-old Andrew Hague allegedly attacked his neighbor Simon Wilkinson, 50, after a verbal altercation broke out in which the 50-year-old allegedly insulted him.
The defendant then told him to “go out and fight like a man” before brutally attacking him with a bag containing five metal boxes full of Pokémon trading cards.
According to Crown prosecutor Laura Marshall, the 30-year-old swung the sack several times like a “cricketer” before grabbing a wooden plank to go after the victim, who was already on the ground and covered in blood on the occasions”.
“I cannot describe the pain and grief we feel, which is sometimes unbearable and is caused by an attack of barbaric, brutal and diabolical violence,” the victim’s mother, Eileen, testified in a statement read in court.
Andrew Hague, who suffers from a psychotic illness and borderline personality disorder, stopped taking his medication shortly before the attack, according to the defense in court.
In acknowledgment of the facts, the 30-year-old would have pleaded guilty and received a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 17 years, the British media continued, saying he would have been re-sentencing at Rampton Maximum Security Psychiatric Hospital.