A drunk teenager risked his life and those of police officers in a desperate bid to escape arrest.
Thomas Alexander Brown clung on to tree branches above a 30-metre drop having flung himself into bushes to evade capture.
Officers gingerly made their way down a steep, near vertical slope in a bid to come to the teenager’s aid, only for him to launch himself into thin air.
He tumbled down to the bottom of the slope and, after picking himself up, apparently unscathed, made off into the darkness.
Brown, who has a lengthening criminal record and numerous periods spent in detention since the age of 16, was traced some hours later and arrested.
Taken to divisional police headquarters in Perth, he turned on the officers who had attempted to offer him assistance, spitting at them and threatening to kill them.
As he was sentenced to another four months’ detention at Perth Sheriff Court on Wednesday, Brown claimed he had been so inebriated he could remember nothing of the incident.
Sheriff Robert McCreadie said: ”I sometimes feel that you simply couldn’t make it up.”
He told Brown that he had ”an appalling” record and expressed the view that he was clearly intent on ”drinking himself into oblivion”.
Tayside Police has been contacted by a terrified Caputh resident who woke shortly after midnight to find the teenager, who was stripped to the waist, roaring drunk and depositing rubbish across her garden.
The 53-year-old woman challenged Brown, but fled back inside, locking her door firmly behind her, after he turned on the householder and began shouting and swearing at her.
”When the police attended Brown ran off and threw himself into a bush, which unfortunately led on to a near vertical 30-metre drop,” said depute fiscal Catherine Fraser.
”As a police constable approached they could see that the accused was clinging on to the branches of a tree. The officer carefully descended the bank but when Mr Brown saw that it was the police coming to his aid he threw himself backwards into a stream and thereafter ran off.”
Brown (19) of Greenbank Crescent, Glenfarg, admitted that on May 27 this year, at The Ale House in Caputh, the A984 Caputh to Spittlefield road and police headquarters in Perth, he behaved in a threatening or abusive manner, entered a garden and emptied the contents of a bin there, shouted and swore and placed the occupier in a state of fear and alarm, then threw himself down a steep embankment and on being approached by the police threw himself back down the embankment and ran off, shouted and swore and made threats to police officers and spat at them.