Hospital order for killer who struck on flats landing

HOMELESS MAN WAS HIT WITH A BARBELL

- By ROB KENNEDY Court Reporter

A MENTALLY ill man who battered a homeless man to death with a barbell as he lay on the landing of a block of flats has been detained in a secure hospital.

Evan Lyons had stopped taking prescribed medication for his paranoid schizophrenia and had been taking class A drugs and drinking alcohol before he killed Christopher Phillips in Gateshead.

The 42-year-old was spending the night on a landing at Tennyson Court flats, in Felling, when Lyons repeatedly smashed him in the head with a weight training bar.

Newcastle Crown Court heard he had already attacked an asylum seeker with a pizza slicer outside the same block of flats and, while waiting for a bed at a high-security psychiatric hospital after being charged with those offences, he left a man he was playing pool with at HMP Durham blind in one eye when he attacked him with a cue.

Lyons, 27, of Tennyson Court, was originally charged with murdering Mr Phillips but he pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Now he has been given a Hospital Order with a restriction, meaning he will be held in a secure hospital indefinitely until it is deemed safe to release him.