A MAN hit his dead mother’s partner in the face with a wine bottle ‘to shut him up’, a court was told.

Kenneth Howson, 26, of Williams Road, Burnley, told police in his interviews that he had followed 55-year-old James Atkinson into a bedroom at a flat in Waddington Avenue, Burnley, after a drinking session.

At Preston Crown Court, where he is on trial for murder, he said Mr Atkinson had been ‘mumbling things about my mum and the insulin’ so he picked up a bottle and hit him ‘five or six times’.

But Howson told police Mr Atkinson was still breathing and that he didn’t kill him.

The prosecution case is that Howson killed Mr Atkinson in a revenge attack in October last year because he blamed him for the death of his mum, Pamela Brown, a month earlier.

Mr Atkinson, a chronic diabetic and alcoholic, lived with Ms Brown, who suffered from depression, in Brunshaw Avenue, the jury was told.

But on the evening of August 29 last year, she had taken an overdose of insulin that had been prescribed to Mr Atkinson, and as a result, died on September 7.

However, Howson told detectives that his relationship with Mr Atkinson was ‘good and bad’.

He said: “We’ve had good times having a laugh, a drink, a smoke together. The bad times were seeing him beat my mum for years.”

He claimed that he held ‘no ill-feeling’ towards Mr Atkinson over the insulin overdose death of his mother, but accepted the question of why he hadn’t done more to help ‘weighed heavily on him’.

Howson told police: “He was still going on saying stuff about my mum and insulin. We were both getting a bit aggressive with each other. I just wanted to shut him up because he kept on going on about my mum.”

Howson claims his friend Daniel Waddington struck the fatal blows to Mr Atkinson after this incident.

Howson, of Williams Road, Burnley, has already been found guilty of the murder of Neil Gilmore, also 55, who lived in the Waddington Avenue flat with Mr Atkinson.

Daniel Waddington, 22, of Pine Street, Burnley, has already been found guilty of the murder of Mr Gilmore and Mr Atkinson.

The trial has already heard both men were attacked with a stick and a bottle with ‘incomprehensible brutality’.

Howson denies the murder of Mr Atkinson.

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