A man with mental health problems who “flipped” and attacked a neighbour in his garden has been released from prison without support.

The Recorder of York, Judge Sean Morris, said: “I am powerless to do anything else.”

In a personal statement, the victim said Connor George Hinds, 30, had had a conversation with him talking normally, and walked calmly away.

Shortly afterwards, as the victim was talking to another neighbour in their communal garden, Hinds had returned and attacked him with a metal bar “as if he had just flipped".

“He came at me to kill me,” the statement said.

Brooke Morrison, prosecuting, said the victim managed to push Hinds away but was hit on the arm and fled down the street with Hinds in pursuit shouting “You …… you wouldn’t fight me”.

In his statement, the victim says he will no longer feel safe if Hinds is a free man.

“I feel I cannot live in my own home or sit in my own garden,” he said.

Hinds, formerly of Burdyke Avenue, Clifton, and now homeless, pleaded guilty to threatening the victim with an offensive weapon and assaulting him.

The judge told him: “Sadly you are one of those people that these courts see time and time and time again with genuine mental health issues not of your own making, but these problems are deemed insufficient or insufficiently serious to help you be placed in a hospital or even in assisted living accommodation which is really what you need.”

He gave him a prison sentence of nine months. Because Hinds had spent the equivalent of a 16-month prison sentence in jail on remand, he was released.

His solicitor advocate Graham Parkin said Hinds was now homeless because he had had to give up his accommodation in Burdyke Avenue, Clifton, as it was too close to where the victim lived.

His mother had done her best to get help for him without success.

“He feels he ought to be in an institution where he could be properly looked after rather than being a problem to other people but there is no place available,” said Mr Parkin.

Ms Morrison said the victim and his neighbour had been talking in their garden at 2pm on June 10 last year when Hinds had arrived and accused the victim of hacking into his wifi.

The victim denied this and Hinds left.

Forty minutes later he returned with an eight-inch metal bar of the type used with one-hand dumbbells and attacked the victim, who suffered reddening on his arm.

Mr Parkin said Hinds’ problems had begun when he was a child and become so severe his mother had been unable to care for him and could no longer have him in her house.