Scots mum and son terrified after neighbour requires chainsaw to back garden fence over dispute

A household experienced to flee their dwelling immediately after a crazed neighbour ruined their 6ft yard fence with a chainsaw after a boundary dispute.

Instructor Maureen O’Neill was so frightened by Anthony McArdle’s outburst that she sold her household in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, and moved absent.

The horror facts emerged at Hamilton Sheriff Court on Tuesday exactly where her son Connor, 21, also a trainer, gave proof by video clip hyperlink.

He explained: “McArdle was pretty intense. He said he was chopping the fence down.

“He switched on the chainsaw and slash through each and every submit on the fence.

“We have been terrified and my mum was screaming. She was traumatised.”

Connor said he observed his neighbour carrying the chainsaw two weeks afterwards.

The witness stated: “McArdle stated, ‘I’m just preparing the following chainsaw attack.’

“I was extremely concerned about what was likely to happen subsequent. That was the only home I’d experienced but I left that working day and hardly ever went back.”

McArdle, 35, a design corporation manager, was convicted of breach of the peace by shouting abuse, seeking to start out a battle and damaging the fence with a chainsaw in April past yr.

He was cleared of threatening or abusive conduct by telling his neighbour on a later event that he was “planning his next chainsaw attack”.

The court heard the dad tore down the 6ft-high fence dividing the homes after professing his neighbour had no correct to establish it.

The fence ran from the entrance of the yard to the wall of Maureen’s house and was place up in the course of a boundary dispute.

McArdle, who owns McArdle Design and Rail Companies Confined, didn’t like it and Maureen been given a letter from a attorney, warning the fence was illegal and would be taken out.

Two weeks later, McArdle lower it down with a chainsaw. Sheriff Ray Compact explained some of the evidence given by Crown witnesses was “exaggerated”.

But he instructed dad-of-two McArdle: “You can’t behave in the way you did. There is some mitigation in that you have been pushed to it by what the O’Neills did and it was the end result of months of stress.

“It saddens me that older people permitted a boundary dispute to deteriorate to the extent that 1 occasion moved residence and the other is at the improper conclusion of serious criminal charges.

“It’s most unfortunate that this was not resolved in a extra amicable way.”

McArdle was fined £250 and offered a a few-12 months ASBO prohibiting him leading to distress to the O’Neills and any other neighbours and harmful assets.

McArdle was approached for remark but did not reply to the Sunday Mail yesterday.