A woman has been jailed for four years after deliberately driving at a man and leaving him with life-changing injuries.

Kerry-jo Spencer pleaded guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm and a separate charge of causing her victim actual bodily harm.

Bradford Crown Court heard today that the man had to have part of his skull removed to relieve the pressure on his brain after he was deliberately knocked down by Spencer in Fairway, Wibsey, Bradford, on April 12 last year.

Spencer, 27, of Watty Hall Road, Wibsey, had left the man facing further surgery to re-place the missing section of his skull, the Recorder of Bradford, Judge Richard Mansell QC said.

Mercifully, the father-of-two survived after a fortnight in an induced coma but his life had been changed forever.

“He has gone from a young, fit man who worked in manual jobs to a man who is unable to work and is reliant on social security benefits,” the judge said.

He told Spencer that her victim was now a totally different person from the man he was and he would require looking after by his family for the foreseeable future, if not the remainder of his life.

The court heard that the victim was at a house party when Spencer arrived at about 11pm.

She got out of her car and almost immediately confronted the man who was standing in the porch.

She then armed herself with an ornament to hit him across the face in an “unprovoked and utterly unjustified” attack.

She got back in her car and reversed off the driveway while he was standing on the pavement.

“I am satisfied that you were waiting for him to move so that you could knock him down with the car, but not hit the lamppost,” Judge Mansell said.

“He cannot possibly have imagined for a minute that you intended to do this and so moved briefly away from the lamppost and into the road. You immediately drove forward and straight at him, not at great speed, but sufficiently fast to prevent him taking evasive action.

“You knocked him to the ground and his head struck either the pavement or the wall behind him as he fell.

“You drove away without a moment’s concern for what you had just done.”

The man was knocked unconscious and suffered fractures to his leg as well as skull fractures leading to intracranial bleeding.

Judge Mansell said his family had gone through an appalling ordeal fearing that he would not survive and if he did that his life would be changed forever.

The court heard that Spencer had previous convictions including a suspended prison sentence in 2015 for an offence of grievous bodily harm.

After leaving hospital her victim spent time at a specialist brain rehabilitation unit before being allowed to return home.

“You used a particularly dangerous weapon, namely your car, to assault the victim in what was again a premeditated assault and you inflicted particularly grave, life-threatening and life-changing injuries,” Judge Mansell told Spencer.

He described her protestations of remorse as “hollow” and said they were designed to minimise her sentence rather than an expression of true remorse.

He banned Spencer, who worked in vehicle recovery, from driving for three years and three months.