A man stood on his doorstep and threatened to kill his elderly neighbours on Christmas Eve while dressed in a festive onesie. Mark Lloyd suddenly appeared on the evening of December 24 last year as Wyndham and Sandra Davies were preparing for a family get-together the next day, shouting that he "couldn't wait until they were all gone."
The incident brought to a head a prolonged period of harassment and intimidation by the 34-year-old, of Heol Llethryd in Pontyberem, Carmarthenshire – behaviour which had made the couple's lives a misery. Yet the ex-miner and former auxiliary nurse's daughter Tamara said the family still don't know exactly what prompted his anti-social tirades in the first place.
"Mam and Dad have lived at that address since the '70s and when Mark first moved in about four or five years ago everything was fine," said the 54-year-old pharmacy worker. "If anything he was a bit too quick to stop for a chat every time he saw them out in the garden."
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Then, one day in January 2021, Wyndham had returned from the local supermarket when he saw Lloyd standing on his garden path. "So my father shouted: 'How are you, boy?' only for him to shout back that, given that he'd just ignored him down the shop, why was he bothering to say hello now. Dad was just stunned and claimed he hadn't seen anyone down the shop. Mam had to go out and bring him back inside."
From that point things went from bad to worse. Tamara added. "During Covid we all followed the social distancing rules to the letter – working in a pharmacy I knew only too well what was and wasn't allowed. So I'd take Mam and Dad's shopping over and sit with them in the garden but Mark would make us feel like we were doing something wrong. It made my parents so uncomfortable they actually asked me to stop visiting altogether."
Afterwards Lloyd got someone in to put up a 6ft fence between their back gardens. "That came as relief, to be honest, because at least Mam and Dad wouldn't have to keep seeing him," said Tamara.
"But one day Dad went out to reseed the lawn and began chipping away at a small bit of concrete which had spilled onto his grass. Suddenly Mark appeared on a ladder over the top of the fence and started screaming that Dad was damaging his property – he then called 999 and the police came round.
"We couldn't believe it and neither could the two officers who showed up. They advised Mam and Dad to log each incident from then on and to ring 101 if needed."
That log would end up being a lengthy document of Lloyd's increasingly erratic behaviour. "Mam would be dusting in the back bedroom and he'd be at the top of his garden making two-finger hand gestures as if to say: 'I'm watching you'," recalled Tamara, adding that whenever her parents went outside he'd be "eyeballing them".
Wyndham and Sandra were eventually advised by a PCSO to install CCTV at their property. "But Mark didn't like that either and told them he'd 'shoot the cameras down' if he discovered they were pointing at him.
"He'd play his radio at full volume all day, whether he was home or not, and would bang on the dividing wall for no reason. It got to the point where my parents were scared to make the slightest noise in case it set him off."
Lloyd also brandished a metal bar at Tamara's brother Brendan after he confronted him in the street about his behaviour. Then, on Christmas Eve last year, Tamara decided to take over some extra kitchen chairs over her folks' house in preparation for a big family dinner the next day.
"It was about six in the evening and me and my daughter were walking up the garden path when Mark came out in his Christmas onesie and told us to stop looking at his house. He then called me a 'f******* c***', adding that he'd 'kill the lot of us' and that he 'couldn't wait until we were all gone'. "Somehow I managed to calmly go inside, which is when I called the police.
Mark Lloyd appeared at Llanelli Magistrates' Court last month where he pleaded guilty to using threatening, abusive, and insulting words and behaviour intended to cause harassment, alarm and distress, also to a charge of stalking, involving serious alarm/distress. Both charges related to a period between January 1, 2021, and December 24, 2022. He was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison, suspended for one year, and was given a two-year restraining order not to approach or contact his neighbours, or Tamara and her daughter, by any means, directly or indirectly, and to attend a rehabilitation programme for up to a maximum of 30 days.
"We're glad justice has been done," said Tamara. "But we still want people to know the hell my parents have gone through these last few years. We feel we need to speak out for all those who might be going through the same thing. We want to do what we can to ensure this doesn't happen to anyone else."
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