A QUICK-thinking woman pulled her granddaughter out of the path of a runaway car seconds before it hit the toddler’s bike in February 2017.

Little Lilly-Jo Alden was riding a balance bike alongside her grandmother Katrina on the way to nursery when they looked up and saw a car hurtling towards them.

The Ford Mondeo hit a parked car before mounting the pavement in Front Street, Cockfield, Teesdale, ahead of the pair.

The 44-year-old reacted instantly, pulling the youngster to safety seconds before the car clipped the bike.

The vehicle then hit another car before coming to a stop when it crashed into a tree.

“I can’t believe what happened,” said Mrs Alden. “I’m shaking just thinking about it. I just keep thinking what could have been.

“We were just walking to nursery when we saw this car coming towards us. At first I didn’t realise there was no-one inside. I just reacted. I didn’t have time to think. I feel like I saved her life. The car clipped her bike. I don’t want to think about what would have happened if she had still been on it.”

The incident was believed to have been caused by handbrake failure on the car which was parked outside Cockfield Workingmen’s Club.

A man was finally jailed in February 2017 after stabbing a man in the neck before fleeing to Abu Dhabi.

I was billed as an “exquisite evening with a gourmet menu”, but a black tie charity Lobster Ball ended “like a scene from a horror film” leaving one guest millimetres from death.

The event at Hardwick Hall Hotel, Sedgefield, which saw 900 guests pay £160-a-head, boasted award-winning chefs and top entertainers, but erupted into a brawl straight from the Wild West.

In a melee sparked by champagne being sprayed, Bishop Auckland businessman Neil Parsons was stabbed in the neck with a broken glass by 50-year-old John Mullen, who was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for the attack on February 8, 2017.

The day after the incident – on April 27, 2012 – Mullen flew to Abu Dhabi and evaded justice until he was arrested in Bulgaria last year.

Teesside Crown Court was shown video of the violence in the luxury hotel’s reception area, involving dozens of suited men.

As staff ran to lock themselves in an office, Mullen, who admitted wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and travelling on a bogus passport, smashed a champagne flute on an ornamental globe and wielded it in the midst of the melee.

He struck Mr Parsons, who had acted as a peacemaker in the fighting, with the jagged end of the glass, leaving a “horrifying” neck wound, which led to the loss of six-and-a-half pints of blood. Medics said shards of glass were buried so close to Mr Parsons’ carotid artery – the main vessel supplying blood to the brain – that he had been “millimetres from death” and that they could not be safely removed.

Finally, the then-Tees Valley mayoral candidate Ben Houchen called for Cleveland Police to be scrapped.

The Conservative Ben Houchen pledged that if he were elected in May 2017, he would set up a commission to bring about the end of the force, which has been mired in controversy for much of the last two decades.

Mr Houchen, a Yarm businessman and councillor, said: “The last few years have been so turbulent for Cleveland Police that I have no objection to bringing the organisation to an end.

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