A VIOLENT man who knifed two people in York within two days has been jailed for more than five years.

Simon David Winterburn, 40, stabbed the first victim in the leg in the victim’s home in Rawcliffe, said Tom Storey, prosecuting at York Crown Court.

He blamed him for the death of a friend by a drug overdose.

Released by police after his arrest, he grabbed a knife from the hand of a second man during a street fight the next day in Acomb.

“Once you had that knife in your hands, you slashed out and you slashed him to his face, cutting his cheek on the cheekbone down towards the jaw and also he was slashed on the hands, no doubt as he was trying to defend himself,” the Recorder of York, Judge Sean Morris, told Winterburn.

Mr Storey said the second victim was left with a face scar and damaged tendons to his hand.

Winterburn, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to two charges of wounding and was jailed for 62 months.

He has served prison sentences for violence in the past.

Defence barrister Timothy Jacobs said that since being remanded into custody on September 30, Winterburn had worked to reform himself.

He was now clean of drugs after being a long term addict.

On his release he planned to keep away from the kind of people he had been associating with and to be closer to his family.

Mr Storey said residents in the Rawcliffe street where the first victim lived called police on September 24 following a disturbance at his home.

The victim answered his door when officers knocked, but was incoherent and high on something.

Shortly afterwards, while police were still in the street, they heard a loud bang and shouting coming from his flat.

They found the victim at the bottom of stairs leading to his flat with a stabbed thigh, a fractured nose, and a cut on his right eyebrow.

The only other person in the flat was Winterburn and there was blood on the kitchen floor.

“You deliberately stabbed him in the leg with a kitchen knife because you blamed him for the death of a friend by an overdose,” the judge told Winterburn.

He also said that during both attacks, Winterburn had been high on drink or drugs or both.

Mr Storey said the first victim told medics Winterburn had stabbed and punched him, but declined to make a statement and died of an unrelated drugs overdose in January 2020.

On September 26, after binge drinking with the second man and sleeping at his flat, Winterburn fought with him in an Acomb street.

Eyewitnesses were horrified by the incident in a residential area.

The second man had a knife, but Winterburn disarmed him.