What happened
On 27 July 2017 two women social workers went to visit a client in Stockton. Christine Hornigold, then 65, of Zetland Road, had warned that she was going to “stab them all, the social workers”, and had chased the two workers away on an earlier visit.
They returned at 12.30pm with a police escort. As their car was held in traffic, Hornigold attacked the vehicle, causing £200 of damage, with both workers inside. As they got out she ran at them with a Stanley knife fitted with a one-and-a-half-inch blade. She got one worker in a headlock, pulled out clumps of her hair and held the knife towards her throat. The worker shouted “Get off me, Christine” as police ran towards them. An officer with a body camera said: “I could see the fear in her eyes, which I’ll never forget.”
The outcome
At Teesside Crown Court in December 2017 Judge Stephen Ashurst sentenced Hornigold to eighteen months’ imprisonment, reduced from two years for her guilty pleas to threatening with a blade, having an offensive weapon, assault by beating and criminal damage. He imposed a lifetime non-contact order.
The body camera footage was played in court. One worker told the hearing: “I see the face of Christine Hornigold coming towards me with a knife. I feared for my life… When I go into a park or into a room I look for an escape route.”
What went wrong
The threat came first, months before, and it named the workers and the weapon. What changed between the threat and the visit was an escort on the day, and nothing in the record suggests anything else changed.
An escort answers the moment of contact. It does not remove the journey, the traffic, or the walk from the car to the door. When the car stopped, both workers were out on a street with a woman coming at them, and the police were still moving.
The pack holds no safeguarding review of how the council handled the warning, no joint plan with the police, and no account of what the pair were told to do if she appeared. This was a two-person visit, and it is here because of that gap.
What it teaches
A named threat with a named weapon is a pre-incident indicator. It belongs in a written plan that names who owns the response, what the visit will look like, and what would stop the visit happening at all.
If the visit goes ahead with an escort, the plan has to cover the parts outside the escort’s reach: where the car stops, who gets out first, which side, and where the exit runs. Those are agreed before the engine is turned off, not on the pavement.
The last lesson is afterwards. A worker who now looks for an escape route in every room describes an injury that outlasts the sentence, and the duty does not end at the courtroom door.
Questions for the room
- A client says today that she will stab the social workers. What do you trigger, and who owns it?
- Your escort is in a second vehicle. What do you agree with them before you get out?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: probable, on the record’s mark, because the account rests on one outlet: the Teesside Gazette of 5 December 2017, which supplies the body camera detail, the prosecutor’s outline and the judge’s remarks. There is no council review and no second report in the pack. The earlier threat is dated only as months before the attack. The £200 figure and the blade measurement are as that single report gives them.
Our lone working training covers threats made in advance and the plan they should trigger.
Sources
- Teesside Gazette · Screams and sirens as pensioner armed with knife attacked two women in street · 2017
Reviewed 20 October 2026.