A MAN who hid from police in the drawer of his partner’s divan bed has been jailed for seven months.

Officers were called to the home of Ricky Elliot’s partner on February 23 this year, after the woman managed to send a text to her cousin asking for help. The couple had been living together off-and-on since November in spite of a restraining order banning him from contacting her.

Prosecutor Tessa Hingston said the woman managed to warn her cousin that Elliot was looking at her phone. “Ring the police. Don’t text or ring me, please. Ricky is here with my phone. Be quick,” she texted.

Police knocked on the door of the Trowbridge house, but Elliot told his partner and a male friend also in the house not to answer it.

Eventually, officers battered their way in. They found him hiding in a drawer in the base of a divan bed.

Ms Hingston said: “When they tried to take Mr Elliot into custody he resisted and was uncooperative because they wouldn’t allow him to have a cigarette first.”

He pinched PC Daniel Chaventre’s face, turning red with the effort.

In his police interview, the man gave what the prosecutor described as a long and rambling account of the problems in his relationship and his own past within the criminal fraternity. He claimed he thought it was people from his past banging on the door and not police officers.

Elliot, who has a lengthy criminal record, is not allowed to contact his ex under the terms of a restraining order given to him last July after he was convicted at Swindon Crown Court of possession of a blade and criminal damage. He admitted using a pogo stick to break windows at his then pregnant partner’s home before holding a knife to his own throat.

He had been given a seven-month suspended sentence with a requirement to complete a building better relationships programme. But probation officer Claire Hyde told the court on Friday that he had failed to attend a single appointment since July.

Alejandra Tascon, defending, said her client had been upset after his partner had terminated their child. He had gone to her home looking for answers.

She acknowledged Elliot had a poor criminal record, but pointed to a gap in his offending between 2016 and 2019.

Her client was committed to change and keen to work with the probation service. He had been in custody on remand throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is a man that needs help with his thinking skills,” she said.

Elliot, of Purlyn Acre, Marlborough, pleaded guilty to breaching his restraining order, assaulting an emergency worker and admitted the breach of his suspended sentence order.

Judge Peter Crabtree activated the seven-month suspended sentence in full and added a month for the order breach and assault on PC Chaventre. The prison time will be served concurrently.

He said: “These current offences are less serious than the ones I sentenced you for in July last year. That’s relevant. I have regard to the sentencing guidelines.

“But you have done not one jot, it seems, or barely one jot to cooperate with probation over the last 10 months.”