A 25-year-old builder who smashed his way into a terrified woman’s flat in Bury St Edmunds and dragged her out of bed before trying to strangle her in the early hours of New Year’s Day has been jailed for 27 months.

Harry McMenamin, who’d been drinking and using cocaine, repeatedly banged on the woman’s locked door and shouted at her to come out, Ipswich Crown Court heard.

The woman called 999 and during the course of her conversation with the operator, banging and screaming could be heard as McMenamin smashed her flat door open and dragged her out of bed.

He had then grabbed the woman, who’d only recently moved into the flat, from behind with his arm across her throat and punched her several times in the head.

During the incident, he said: “This is a life and death situation. Do you think I’ll just let you go?”

“She felt she was going to die and begged him to let her go,” said Dinal Lawlor, prosecuting.

McMenamin eventually told the woman that she had better leave and she had run out of the house into the street in her nightwear and bare feet just as police arrived.

After his arrest McMenamin had tested positive for cocaine and he had also been drinking, said Mr Lawlor.

The court heard that before McMenamin burst into the woman’s flat she heard him arguing and shouting at one of her flatmates and the sound of smashing.

In a statement read to the court the victim, who is a psychologist, said she had been so traumatised by the incident that she had been unable to return to her flat and had spent some time living in a hotel before moving into a house only occupied by women.

She said that when McMenamin burst into her room she had been paralysed with fear and thought he was going to kill her.

She now had trouble sleeping and kept playing what happened over in her mind. She also had started carrying a personal alarm and had started self-defence classes.

McMenamin of Cricks Road, West Row, admitted assaulting the woman causing her actual bodily harm and criminal damage to the door of her flat.

Pamela Brain for McMenamin, accepted the woman must have been extremely frightened during the incident and said her client was “remorseful, devastated and ashamed” of what he’d done.

She said he’d been drinking and had taken cocaine and had little memory of the incident.

“It was completely out of character,” said Miss Brame.