MAN GUILTY OF VIOLENT ATTACKS ON FRASERBURGH CHILDREN AFTER THREE-DAY TRIAL
A man has been found guilty of violently beating children in Fraserburgh.Tomas Sakalauskas, 47, stood trial at Peterhead Sheriff Court this past week where he had denied a series of charges relating to his treatment of youngsters and a woman in the north-east.
But today, following three days of evidence, a jury found him guilty by majority of attacks on two of the children.
He was cleared of beating a third child and of stalking his ex.
She had told the court that Sakaluskas’s behaviour towards her left her living in fear and unable to sleep.
Woman left ‘afraid’ by lorry driver The mother, who we cannot name for legal reasons, said that his treatment of children had been revealed after she decided to split from him in 2023.
Under questioning from fiscal depute Brian Young, the woman said afterwards she had lived in worry.
Fighting back tears as she gave her evidence, the woman told the court Sakaluskas had lured her to Scotland in 2017 with the promise of a “bright future”.
She would end up afraid of him, however, and leave the lorry driver.
“I was afraid to stay by myself,” said the woman.
She added: “I was afraid of Tomas.
I was afraid of a lot of things.” Continuing her evidence, the woman said: “I was actually losing sleep.
“I was aware of every crack in the house, every noise at night.
I was just feeling like he was everywhere.
He was like a shadow.” She said her children told her Sakalauskas would punch, kick and grab one of them by the neck when they did not clean their room to his standards, and on another occasion give a nursery-aged sibling a black eye.
Tomas Sakalauskas would leave one child with a black eye.
Image: Facebook ‘He didn’t want to live anymore’ A police interview with one of his victims revealed that Sakalauskas, whose address was given as Brora Place in Fraserburgh, would mete out beatings “once a week”.
Their mum had told the court the children had never raised the alarm about these because they were “too afraid” before reaching their breaking points.
Each of the children, who were attacked between 2018 and 2023, would go on to tell their mum that they were suicidal.
“He was really depressed,” the woman said of her son.
She added: “It reached a point I had to take his shoe laces off his shoes .
.
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He didn’t want to live anymore.” Her daughter, then aged 13, would call her in tears saying she had similar thoughts due to the attacks.
It was that girl whose evidence was played to the jury.
The case called at Peterhead Sheriff Court.
Image: DC Thomson ‘Took me by the neck’ Speaking to a police officer at her school, the girl described having finished cleaning when she was kicked and then punched by Sakalauskas.
“I was standing beside the window downstairs and he just kicked me in the back,” she said.
“I fell to the ground.
I stood up, he punched me on the shoulder.” She went on to describe Sakalauskas spitting in her face before “he took me by the neck and pushed me against a wall”.
The teen added that her siblings would also face attacks at Sakalauskas’s hands and, on one occasion, he “threw” her brother off a chair because he did not finish his meal.
A doctor at Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital, who investigated the boy when he had presented with a black eye, surmised that his injury was “non-accidental”.
