A DORSET Police detective has gone on trial accused of pushing his wife to the ground causing an injury to her head, hand and shoulder.

Detective Constable David Alway, 41, is accused of assault occasioning actual bodily harm to Tamsyn Alway at their home in Bournemouth, Dorset, overnight on Friday December 13 2019.

A friend of Mrs Alway, Simon Storr, told Southampton Crown Court that he was on a video call with her in the early hours of December 14, 2019, when the defendant returned home from a night out and a row erupted between the couple.

Mr Storr said: “He (Alway) came to Tamsyn’s room, the conversation between them was unsettled, it was getting a bit heated.

“Tamsyn was saying ‘You can’t just come into my room, can you please close the door, I am on the phone with someone’.

“He did leave the room, the door was slammed loudly, she was surprised and shouted ‘What the ****’.”

Mr Storr continued: “I said ‘Are you OK? Is everything OK?’, she was upset at the door being slammed as the mirror had come off the wall.

“I asked her to get her belongings and leave the house, she was upset.”

He added: “Tamsyn was hysterical when things were getting out of control.”

Mr Storr said he organised an Uber taxi to pick her up and when she arrived at his home, he said she was “very distressed”.

He said that Mrs Alway had an injury to her hand and a “large lump on her head” which she said had happened as she was pushed into the garden as she went to bring her dogs inside.

Detective Sergeant Mark Portelli, who was the defendant’s line manager at Dorset Police, said that he was informed of the allegation on December 17 and shortly afterwards Alway asked to have a private word with him.

Mr Portelli said that Alway told him of the incident, saying: “When I got home from my night out, Tamsyn and I had a row, I pushed her and she fell to the ground and hurt her wrist.

“I thought it was a minor injury but now she is saying she has fractured her wrist, she is now saying she wants me to move out of the house.”

Mr Portelli said Alway was “very emotional, very teary, very upset”.

He said the defendant was arrested shortly afterwards to be interviewed about the allegation.

Sheelagh Rogers, the complainant's mother, said in a statement read to court that her daughter had been married to the defendant for five years and they had been together 10 years.

She said her daughter had ended the marriage in June 2019 but they remained living in the same house but in separate bedrooms as neither could afford to move to a new house.

Ms Rogers said that her daughter had told her that Alway had “burst into her room” and “grabbed her around the neck” in a previous incident in July that year.

She said her daughter told her that Alway had been angered after reading text messages on her phone.

Ms Rogers said that she spoke to her daughter on the morning after the December incident and said she was “in a very distressed state”.

In his police statement read to the court, Alway told officers: “I pushed Tamsyn in self defence.

“She was standing directly in front of me, shouting and screaming at me, saying she hated me.

“She previously assaulted me four or five months ago, she punched me in the face. At that time it was very similar circumstances.”

He added: “I pushed her with two hands with no intention of hurting her, to get her away from me. I was concerned at what she would do to me.”

Neither Alway, whose address was given in court as now in Poole, or Mrs Alway made a formal complaint about the July incident.

Alway denies the charge in relation to the December incident and the trial continues.

A Dorset Police spokesman said that Alway had been placed on restricted duties following the allegation.