A 19-year-old man from Penge has been jailed for slashing a homeless woman with a knife as she was “cowering like a dog under a sink”.

Niyah Ivey, of Elmers End Road, attacked Sarah Marrill in a drug den in Brighton on November 15 last year.

Ms Marrill was hiding in a bathroom attempting to call police when Ivey broke the door down before snatching her phone.

He then tried to slash her face, but Ms Marrill protected herself with a mop bucked, resulting in her thigh being slashed.

The Penge teenager then called a friend claiming to have “sliced the bitch”.

He admitted wounding with intent to cause GBH at Brighton Crown Court, before being sentenced to six years and four months in prison.

Ms Marrill had been staying in the squat since November with her boyfriend, Neil Hudders, but when Ivey arrived he forced the homeless couple to sleep in the bathroom.

The 999 call of the attack was played in court.

Judge Shani Barns told Ivey: “It’s a depressing statement of this case, that we have a 19-year-old boy terrorising a grown woman to the extent that she was cowering like a dog under a sink.

"What is a young boy from London doing living in a drug den in Brighton?

“One might be forgiven for thinking that you are a serious, hardened criminal with years of experience, cold and calculating.

“It’s even more shocking that you are 19 years old. It was not a one-off isolated moment of madness. You thought you were a big shot, running the place. You clearly believed you were invincible in your delusion of youth.

“The footage shows what you reduced that pathetic grown woman to. Those are images I won’t get out of my mind very easily.

“You are incredibly lucky that you didn’t cause greater harm to the victim, otherwise you might have appeared for attempted murder.

“With your family listening, I hope you do feel ashamed. You are from a good family where everyone wanted to love you. No one abandoned you.”

Ivey is believed to have come from a loving family – but was expelled from school and appeared in youth courts for small offences, including spitting at a bus driver.