A POLICE officer who arrested a mentally-ill man days before he killed himself has said he was more worried about him having a knife than the state of his mental health.

PC Alvin Doxon said Adam Stanmore wasn’t ‘physically injured’ when he found him sitting on a wall of a residential street in Blackbird Leys.

However, he said he was ‘acting weirdly’.

The police had been called to the area on May 18, 2019, after he shouted at a woman and asked her for a knife. She gave him a large silver blade which was ‘smaller than a machete’.

It took officers about half an hour to find him but only four minutes to Taser him and then put him in the back of a police van to go to the station.

PC Doxon told jurors in an inquest at Oxford Coroner’s Court yesterday that he had been crewed with PC Rachel Parrott.

He said that had seen Mr Stanmore sitting on the wall at 4.07pm and rolled down his window to ask his name.

Mr Stanmore looked back at him with an ‘intense gaze, almost as if he was looking through him’.

At the same time, an armed unit was on its way.

PC Doxon said he then asked Mr Stanmore if was carrying a knife, and Mr Stanmore nodded and then pointed to his right hip.

It was then that PC Parrott said she heard him saying that he wanted to stab himself.

Two minutes later, a radio message was logged from the car saying: “Male acting weird.”

By 4.10pm the ‘pops of the Taser’ were heard as it was deployed, and seconds later he was put into handcuffs on the ground.

By this point, about six police officers were at the scene and Mr Stanmore was loaded into the back of a police van.

A lawyer representing Mr Stanmore’s family asked PC Doxon if he had seen any officers kick Mr Stanmore in the head while he was on the ground.

PC Doxon said that he did not.

He also said: “I was not too concerned about his mental health, I was worried about the knife and what his intentions were with that knife.

“Even though I thought he might be going through a crisis because of the way he looked at me, the fact still remains that he had a large knife.”

After arriving at Abingdon Police Station, the healthcare team were called to see Mr Stanmore to check his blood sugar levels.

They were ‘dangerously’ low so he was given cups of juice, biscuits and some gel.

He was then searched by PC Doxon which is when the officer said that Mr Stanmore told him: “I wanted to take my head off, that is what I wanted to do.”

The officers were sent back to base in Cowley but then were called back to Abingdon to escort Mr Stanmore to hospital as he was still under arrest.

However, moments later they were stood down and eventually the custody sergeant released him without charge and sent him to the hospital in an ambulance.

But he discharged himself.

Four weeks later, on June 13, his body was discovered in a woodland behind Grenoble Road in Blackbird Leys.

The jurors in the case are charged with giving a formal conclusion on how Mr Stanmore died, and the hearing continues.

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