A DRUG supplier who battered a cocaine user and his mother with a metal bar to enforce a £60 debt has been jailed for seven and a half years.

Christopher Neil Gregory, 28, beat the occasional cocaine user “mercilessly”, regarded him “with utter contempt” and portrayed him as someone of no worth to a jury, said Judge Andrew Stubbs QC.

“You decided you would do everything you could to get that money,” the judge told Gregory.

“You issued threats and when that didn’t work, you decided to take matters literally into your own hands.

“When his mother intervened, you beat her around the head with the same weapon, knocking her to the floor as well,” he said. The user told the jury he only used cocaine “occasionally” and couldn’t afford to pay the £60 debt.

Michael Bosomworth, prosecuting, said the user suffered a broken jaw, a broken nose and some of his teeth were knocked out in the attack outside the mother’s Acomb home at 7pm on March 20.

Gregory, of Adelphi House, Windsor Garth, Acomb, denied causing grievous bodily harm with intent to the cocaine user and actual bodily harm to the mother but was convicted unanimously by a jury on both charges at York Crown Court yesterday.

The same jury cleared him of two charges, which he also denied, of criminal damage by breaking both victims’ windows.

He has previous convictions for violence, and has served prison sentences in the past.

In evidence, Gregory said he only knew the user through Facebook and had given him the cocaine “as a favour” to a friend of his. He said he lived on benefits and alleged he had “written off" the debt after trying for weeks to get the money.

He claimed he couldn’t have done the attacks because he had been with his girlfriend elsewhere when they occurred.

His barrister Peter Byrne said after the verdicts: “There is very little mitigation.”

He said members of Gregory’s family would suffer through his imprisonment, adding: “He has brought it upon himself."