Drunken women stabbed boy, 13, in row over Xbox

A DRUNKEN woman stabbed a 13-year-old boy after he refused to stop playing his Xbox.

Isobel Mackenzie, 55, lunged at the teenager and struck him in the abdomen with a kitchen knife after they rowed about him using the games console and a computer.

A jury at Inverness Sheriff Court found her guilty after a three-day trial. Mackenzie had earlier admitted wilfully neglecting the boy by being in a drunken state while he was in her care last December.

Yesterday, she escaped a jail sentence and was ordered by Sheriff Margaret Neilson to do 300 hours' community service. She had denied assaulting the boy to the danger of his life and claimed that he had inflicted the wound himself in an attempt to get her into trouble.

But the boy told the jury: "She hit me on the back of the head. I stood up and pushed her back. We started fighting.

She pushed me back down on the chair. I saw she had a knife.

"I got up and tried to push her back, and then got stabbed."

He told the court it was deliberate, adding: "She lunged at me."

Sheriff Neilson said the crime against a child in her care was "very serious".