A PAIR of drug addicts who launched a vicious attack on a paraplegic man as he lay in his bed were jailed for 12 years each on Friday.

Matthew Edwards and a third unknown thug attacked disabled Andrew Durey with their fists and the hilt of a samurai sword, and threatened him with a knife while Leanne Mayers struck Mr Durey’s partner and carer on the head with a stone.

Later in the assault on March 3 this year, which lasted several minutes, she took up a kettle and beat 31-year-old Mr Durey repeatedly around the head.

He suffered multiple injuries including a bleed in his brain requiring surgery; his assailants eventually made off with two mobile phones and a quantity of his medication.

The victim's mother has asked the Daily Echo to use the shocking images to show the extent of her son's injuries. 

Sentencing at Bournemouth Crown Court, Judge Samuel Wiggs said: “The photographs of Mr Durey in his own home are some of the worst scenes of bloody violence I have ever been shown in court.”

After the case the victim’s mother, Julie Levy, said she was pleased with the sentences.

“As a mother I felt like doing the same to them,” she said.

“My son has stitches from the front of his head to the back, he couldn’t defend himself.”

Prosecutor Adam Feest said Edwards and Mayers had visited Mr Durey, who was paralysed in a motorbike crash 12 years ago, at his flat in Parsonage Road to buy prescription drugs.

He said: “It is only right to say police do have some intelligence that Mr Durey on occasions supplied his own prescription drugs to others.

“This is largely the reason for the defendants having been at the flat.”

Mr Feest said both defendants had lengthy criminal records including violent assaults, with Edwards, 32, having 54 offences to his name, and Mayers, 29, having 75 offences.

In mitigation, the court heard that both defendants had endured a troubled upbringing and were addicted to drugs. Edwards, whose address was given as HMP Winchester, watched his mother overdose on drugs when he was nine years old, and began using them himself just four years later.

Mayers, of no fixed abode, was a long-term addict and prostitute. The court heard that her background made “distressing reading”.

Both defendants had entered guilty pleas to two counts of robbery, but only on the first day of their trial.

Mayers also pleaded guilty at a late stage to separate counts of possession with intent to supply heroin and cocaine on April 8, 2013, and to assault occasioning actual bodily harm relating to an incident just days after the attack on Mr Durey in which she threw a glass at the face of man with Asperger syndrome when he refused to give her a cigarette.

She received concurrent jail terms for these crimes.