Iced-up Mornington tree branch-wielding carjacker stole hire car
An ice-addled who had been awake eight days used a tree branch to carjack a homeless man has faced court for nicking a Frankston hire car.
South East
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A violent carjacker who terrified a homeless man and stole his car after he had been on an eight-day drug bender has been jailed — again.
Nicholas Allan Perman, also known as Nicholas Barbour, is serving a sentence for attacking the destitute man with a tree branch before stealing his vehicle.
The 30-year-old faced another series of ice-fuelled charges at the online Frankston Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday.
The father of three pleaded guilty to car theft, attempted theft from a vehicle, unlicensed driving and going equipped to steal.
He also admitted doing just eight of 200 unpaid work hours that had been imposed on a community corrections order in 2017.
The court heard at around 9.30pm on May 12 last year a man was cleaning his rental hire car at the Karingal Hub Shopping Centre in Frankston.
As he went to empty rubbish into a nearby bin an opportunistic Perman jumped in the car and drove off.
The next morning he was seen by police driving in the Rosebud Woolworths carpark and pulled over.
When the vehicle was searched officers found rubber gloves, a screwdriver and a shifter in the driver’s footwell.
After he was arrested Perman told cops he thought the car had been “abandoned and dumped”, so he just took it.
He said he “wasn’t thinking clearly” at the time as he was “badly affected by ice”.
And in December last year a car that had been stolen from Frankston and found by police very close to Perman’s Mornington home had his fingerprints on the driver’s window.
The court heard he was jailed earlier this year by the County Court for a vicious carjacking in Frankston.
After taking ice and GHB and not sleeping for eight days he was highly agitated when he saw a homeless man sleeping inside a parked car.
Perman picked up a tree branch, smashed the car’s windows, dragged the man out, threw him to the ground and drove off in the vehicle.
He was given a 20-month jail term with a non-parole period of a year, and could be freed in April 2021.
His defence lawyer said at the time he was in “an extraordinarily bad headspace” but was now clean of drugs.
She said he had a supportive family and good prospects of rehabilitation.
Magistrate Julian Ayres said substance abuse was the catalyst for this offending and when Perman is released he should continue to access programs to hopefully remain drug-free.
He was jailed for a total of three months, to run concurrently with his County Court sentence, and disqualified from driving for nine months.
