Violent Derbyshire offender still on loose after sentence for knife crimes and assault

Dylan Hicking was only wearing boxer shorts when he emerged from his home on Thorpes Road, Heanor, and chased a man while wielding a ten-inch carving knife at midday on January 7, 2021.

“I'll cut you up. I'll slice you. I'll f****** kill you,” he shouted at his victim and later rang him to say: “I know where you live. I will kill your family and kill your kids. You don't know who you are messing with coming to my front door.”

After his arrest, Hicking covered a CCTV camera with tissue paper and damaged a cell door so badly it could only be forced open, Ellesse Taylor, prosecuting, told Nottingham Crown Court.

Six weeks later, outside Shop 4 U in Langley Mill, he punched a man straight in the face, causing his nose to bleed. His victim put him in a headlock and threw him against the shop’s shutters while Hicking’s friend also attacked him.

Police arrived to separate them and Hicking later admitted common assault but denied making threats with the knife.

He fled on the second day of a trial at Nottingham Crown Court last September and also eluded Lincolnshire police as recently as last Friday.

The court heard Hicking, now 23, had repeatedy threatened people with weapons while committing earlier offences.

In December 2018 he brandished a pipe at police and claimed he was armed, shouting: “I’ll blast a hole through your skull.” And in August 2019 he coshed and threatened to stab a moped rider in Langley Mill.

Catherine Picardo, mitigating, described him as “a very angry young man” with a “very troubled upbringing”.

His criminal record includes possession of offensive weapons, actual bodily harm, and assaulting an emergency worker. He was jailed twice for criminal damage and affray in 2020.

Sentencing Hicking in his absence on Wednesday, Judge Julie Warburton gave him two years and nine months in prison.

That sentence will be added to the 34 months that was imposed - again in his absence - at Derby Crown Court last year, for controlling and coercive behaviour and actual bodily harm.