WAGGA LOCAL COURT
"IF YOU come in I'll die and I'll take one of you with me," Michael Millar yelled to police behind a locked bedroom door in a Forest Hill house.
And there were other chilling threats.
"I'll stab you in the throat with this .... knife," was one.
"It's game on, if you want to play, I'll play," was another.
Millar on Monday was jailed for 18 months with 12 months' non-parole for the New Year's Eve stand-off with up to 50 police.
The area around the house where Millar was staying with his grandmother was locked down for about five hours until Millar gave up peacefully.
He pleaded guilty to common assault and two counts of intimidating police.
Millar's solicitor in Wagga Local Court told magistrate Erin Kennedy the strange thing about the case was how a huge number of police became involved.
He said Millar was a 27-year-old man with substance abuse problems who had traded punches with a young person in the house.
He then went into a bedroom and locked the door, and an hour or so later police turned up.
"He gets transformed into - I struggle to find the words to describe it - a siege situation and it has a dynamic of its own," Mr Allen said.
"A number of police turn up, he mouths off while holed up in his room."
Mr Allen said the situation took some hours to finish up.
"What happened in the end was a lot of fuss but no actual physical harm beyond the assault earlier in the piece," Mr Allen said.
He said Millar accepted the police operation had been expensive.
Millar was granted bail on January 1 but breached the bail by not returning to court on January 7.
He was arrested the next day in a Wagga pub and has been in custody since.
"It's the drugs and alcohol that caused that to come about," Mr Allen said of the failure to appear.
"It's not that he has headed off to Victoria, he is just so disordered in his life he had not turned up to court."
Ms Kennedy described Millar's offences as very serious and said he was to blame for what happened.
She said the police facts tendered to the court were incredibly serious and included him punching a 15-year-old in the face.
Ms Kennedy declined to backdate Millar's jail sentence to when he went into custody.
