A south Essex man has been jailed for 11 months after he was caught carrying a hunting knife and a machete in two separate incidents.
A defence barrister for Arnold Iyamah, 19, said he had been “groomed” by negative influences after an unfortunate childhood, but had now vowed to cut them out of his life.
“He has made a list of all the people he will be avoiding, blocking and having no contact with,” Sadaf Etemadi told Basildon Crown Court on Wednesday (February 25).
Iyamah, of Clayburn Gardens in South Ockendon, was stopped and searched in Grays town centre when police noted that he strongly smelled of cannabis, said prosecutor Rory Gordon.
The search, on December 19 2024, found he was carrying “a large hunting knife in a sheath”.
He also had cannabis bud in a deal bag, six individually wrapped cannabis buds and a cannabis grinder.
Six months later, on June 28 2025, Essex Police officers spotted a moped driving along Hogg Lane, away from Grays town centre.
The pillion passenger had no helmet and seemed to be pulling his hood down to hide his face from them.
They pulled the moped over and discovered the passenger was Iyamah. Down his right trouser leg, he had a black machete in a green case.
Judge Peter Clark heard that before these two incidents, Iyamah had already been prosecuted for another charge of possessing a bladed article.
Miss Etemadi said Iyamah had ADHD and a neurodevelopmental impairment and had suffered “emotional neglect, unstable care-giving and systemic failures” in his childhood.
He spent nine years in foster care, she said, and was groomed by peers who introduced him to cannabis and then criminality.
“This way of life was normalised,” she alleged.
“With the right intervention and support, he could have had a very different path.”
Recorder Clark said Iyamah had been drawn into a lifestyle which “very often leads to trouble of the gravest kind and all to often leaves people in the mortuary and leaves young men facing life sentences and wasting away their lives in prison.”
He sentenced Iyamah to 11 months in prison.
Spotting a bandage on the defendant’s finger, he asked him what he had done.
“I cut it in the gym,” Iyamah said over the prison video link. “I split my fingernail.”
“Oh, well at least it wasn’t on a bladed article, eh?” quipped the judge.
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