The woman, whom we are not naming, ended up in the hospital after taking the overdose. Processing of her, Andrew Judge told Oxford Crown Court on Friday (February 24): “He had had enough of the situation and wanted to get away from it.”
The overdose led to her admission to Horton General Hospital in Banbury, and later to the involvement of Thames Valley Police.
For that stage -March 3, 2020- the woman had been struggling for a couple of weeks with the jealous attentions of Amar Hamid, 30, whom she met on a night out in Birmingham on February 8 and with whom she had a brief love relationship.
Judge said their fledgling relationship had ” been going well ” until he began to become ” controlling and aggressive ” .
On February 17, she discovered that Hamid had taken an ‘intimate photo’ of her without her consent. He told her “if you ever leave me I’ll kill you” and threatened to share her image with her family and people she knew in Banbury.
She asked him to delete the photograph, which he did. However, he continued to send her nasty messages, including one that read, “I’m going to ruin you, just watch.”
Judge said: “(The complainant) did not end the relationship with him because she was terrified of what might happen.
“I was getting phone calls every day and felt like I had to get back in touch with him, even while I was at work.
“There were times when she was at her home address and Mr. Hamid would come and send pictures of his car, of his house, and she remembers feeling distraught about it.”
Matters came to a head on March 3, when the court heard that he had overdosed and ended up in hospital.
Hamid’s abusive messages were said to have continued and she believed he was going to show the “intimate photograph” of her to his family, the court was told.
On March 4, the police were called after Hamid jumped out of his car and began ‘breaking’ the window of the woman’s car, yelling ‘open the fucking door’.
Interviewed by the police, Hamid denied any wrongdoing and did not respond to questions put to him by the police.
The defendant, from Church Lane, Birmingham, was due to stand trial last month on charges of harassment that put her in fear of violence and threatened her with death. She pleaded guilty to a lesser alternative of simple harassment, which was accepted by the Crown Prosecution Service.
On Friday, Registrar Ann Mulligan imposed a 15-week prison sentence suspended for two years, with 150 hours of unpaid work and up to 45 sessions of probation service. A restraining order prevents him from contacting the victim for three years.
For help, contact the Samaritans on 116 123 or visit www.samaritans.org.