Mirrorpix After his dad threatened to chop his family up with a kitchen knife, Ben Wilson beat him with a hammer. He was jailed for six years – but he doesn’t regret it.
The 27-year-old says he was forced to ‘take matters into his own hands’ after years of domestic abuse and cries for help.
After being released from jail last year, Ben has recounted that fateful night in May 2014. ‘I’d do the same again,’ he said.
PixabayOne night, when he was just 22, he couldn’t take it anymore. Ben snapped, hitting his violent father, Craig, eight times in the face, leaving him with brain damage and holes in his face.
Ben told the Mirror:
I could have dealt with it in a different way. But I’d seen the police visit the house many times and they didn’t do f*ck all. And no matter how many times we’d cried for help, it wouldn’t happen. So I took matters into my own hands.
It had been a birthday party for his mother, Tracey: at the barbecue, Craig downed a bottle of Sambuca.
Ben explained:
We’d been playing a game, then dad picked up a knife saying, ‘I’m going to cut you all up and kill you all. He went upstairs and smashed things. Mam followed. I heard screaming.
I picked up a hammer from my toolbag and went up. He said: ‘What the f*ck are you doing, you creepy c*nt, what’s behind your back?’ I belted him on the temple. I hit him eight times supposedly. I only remember once. I didn’t want to kill him
MirrorpixAfterwards, in a panicked state and covered in blood, Ben cycled straight to the police station to confess to ‘killing my dad’. ‘I was distraught. I had just wanted to make him stop. My life was ruined but I thought, at least I’ve done it for my family,’ Ben added.
After admitting to grievous bodily harm in January 2015, the judge at Teesside Crown Court handed Ben six years in jail – the lowest possible sentence. This was a result of Ben’s previous good character and his dad’s abuse against his 48-year-old mother.
Google MapsBen added:
I wanted it to stop… I sacrificed myself to save my mam. I thought if I have to do prison for the rest of my life for my family, then I’m going to do it.
I’d made a massive mistake, but the way I see it, and I still see it now is that if I didn’t do that, then what’s to say my mum would be here now or I would be here now.
Ben had endured a decade of witnessing his dad abuse his mother. On New Year’s Eve, 2007, Craig threatened to cut her ‘f*cking head off’, before throttling her so hard her ‘eyes were popping out’. He was jailed for two years for the attack, but that didn’t stop the violence after his release.
In November 2016, as Ben tried to rebuild his relationship with his dad, Craig took his own life – he was given permission to attend the funeral. While Ben blames himself for his father’s death, he doesn’t regret that night in 2014.
MirrorpixBen said:
I used to worry every night thinking ‘What will he do next?’ You can’t wake up thinking: ‘Am I going to die today or is mam going to die today?’ I was on edge.
My dad was my best mate, but when he had a drink he was the devil. Before that I had a brilliant childhood. We’d go on holidays to Turkey and Ibiza. But he got depressed after his dad died when I was about 13. He’d drink, mam would challenge him and the rows would start. It became the norm.
Now, Ben is urging other judges to be lenient in cases where people are protecting their family from abuse.
He said: ‘The law should state you’re defending a family member.’
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.