A man caught with a tomahawk told police he’d just been doing axe throwing practice in a friend’s garden.

Mark Quinn, 46, claimed to have drawn a stick man on a broken gate, put it up in his friend’s Abingdon back garden and used it as a target.

He realised he didn’t have a key fob to get back into his pal’s home so made his way out the back gate through a communal car park, where he was seen by police, Oxford Crown Court heard.

Officers also found a flick knife in his trouser pocket, which he claimed he had found earlier that day when he was retrieving the broken gate from piles of rubbish.

Quinn, of Southmoor Way, Abingdon, denies possession of an offensive weapon and possession of a bladed article.

Opening the case for the prosecution at Quinn’s trial yesterday, barrister Alexandra Bull said: “There is no issue in this case that Mr Quinn was in possession of the knife. No issue he was in possession of the axe at the time of his arrest.

“The issue for you is this: when he was in possession of these two items, in respect of the flick knife did he have a reasonable excuse and in respect of the bladed article did he have good reason [to have it]?”

She added: “The Crown say, putting it simply, that he did not.”

The jury heard police were called to Southmoor Way, Abingdon, on December 29, 2018. When PCs Matthew Holland and Stuart Talbot pulled into a communal car park they saw Quinn walking across the car park with an axe in his hand.

He was asked to drop the axe, which he did, and told the officers: “It’s just my tomahawk. I was using it for target practice in my friend’s garden. I have no keys to get in.”

Quinn confirmed he had nothing on him that would harm the police officers, although the PC searching him found a flick knife in the man’s pocket.

The defendant was arrested and taken to Abingdon police station. Interviewed later that day, he said he’d bought the ‘throwing tomahawk’ around three weeks earlier.

He had found an old gate door among rubbish near his friend’s home and took it back to her garden to use as a target.

While shifting the waste he found the blue flick knife, put it in his pocket then forgot he had it, he claimed. “I thought ‘that’s bad timing’,” he told officers of the knife’s discovery by the police.

The axe-throwing enthusiast claimed he left the back garden as he didn’t have keys to the back door, meaning he had to go through the car park to reach his friend’s front door.

The trial continues.

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