A WOLLASTON teenager who kicked a former friend in the back after he was called “scarface” has avoided a spell behind bars.

Matthew Barker knocked Corey Spruce face first onto the pavement, fracturing his jaw and damaging two front teeth, while Mr Spruce was on his knees inflating the tyres on his bike.

“The first thing I knew was being kicked in the back,” Mr Spruce, 21, told Wolverhampton Crown Court. “I head-butted the ground but I managed to get back up and I saw him [Barker].

“I have known him since I was 12 and we were quite good friends until the fire in my mother’s flat. We fell out over that and we have not got on since.”

Barker, of Kingsway, had suffered facial scarring when both men were involved in a fire six years earlier.

Mr Spruce, who was giving evidence in a trial into the basis of 19-year-old Barker’s guilty plea to wounding, said: “We had seen each other in the street on occasions since then and had heated arguments, but there had not been any violence before this.”

Barker told the court that he lost his temper when Mr Spruce twice called him “scarface” after they bumped into each other in Stourbridge town centre.

He said: “He had called me that before, but my anger just built up this time and overwhelmed me when I saw him again – a couple of minutes after the word had been mentioned for the second time.

“My intention was to inflict a bit of pain but nothing like what actually happened. It was meant to say ‘don’t call me that’. It was never my intention to put him in hospital.”

Recorder Nigel Baker QC ruled there had been provocation after the taunts made about the facial scarring and he gave Barker 21 months detention in a Young Offenders Institution, suspended for two years.

He told Barker – a man with no previous convictions - “You were both burnt in a fire when you were much younger and you suffered more extensively.

“I am satisfied the shouts of ‘scarface’ caused the anger, that you had previously suppressed, to explode into an attack that was completely out of character.”

Edward Soulsby, prosecuting, said Barker, who was further ordered to carry out 140 hours unpaid work in the community, struck as Mr Spruce was working on his bike in the Ryemarket.