A drug supplier beat a man about the head with a crash helmet after he failed to pay for $50 of crack cocaine, Supreme Court heard yesterday.

Crown counsel Oonagh Vaucrosson alleged that victim Ashley Smith was enjoying an evening at a friend's house when defendant David Trott arrived and assaulted him.

However, Rick Woolridge, defending Trott against the charge of grievous bodily harm with intent, put it to the victim yesterday that he was actually the aggressor and Trott was merely defending himself.

Mr. Smith, 45, from Dunscombe Road, Warwick, told the jury he knew 22-year-old Trott, of Broken Hill Lane, Smiths, from visits to Devil's Hole in that parish. At 10.30 p.m. on January 7 last year he said he was at a house in Ramgoat Hill, Smith's, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer with two friends when Trott arrived at the door of the bedroom he was in.

"He approached in a 'hyper' type of manner and he requested $50 I owed to him for crack rock cocaine I had credited from earlier, in November," he said in answer to questions from Ms. Vaucrosson.

After seeing Trott looking through drawers in the kitchen, he said he fled the house but Trott chased him out into the road and hit him with a crash helmet.

"He swung it at my eye mainly. I felt great pain," said Mr. Smith, who said he tried to protect himself with his hands. He explained that he later required three stitches to a wound above his eye at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital plus treatment for a swollen finger and grazed knees.

He also told the court that Trott ? who made off on the back of a bike ridden by another person ? approached him around two months later and asked him to drop the charges.

In answer to cross-examination from Mr. Woolridge, he agreed he had known the defendant all his life.

However, when Mr. Woolridge put it to him that he was "drinking Heineken and doing drugs," on the night in question he disagreed, telling the lawyer: "I was not doing drugs, and I was drinking Elephants, not Heineken."

He agreed he was intoxicated at the time but denied that by leaving the house through the kitchen he had been running towards the perceived threat of Mr. Trott rather than away from him.

"I was just getting out of there as soon as I could," he said.

Mr. Woolridge put it to Mr. Smith that he was in fact the aggressor in a fight between the pair. He said that he had slugged Trott in the face, causing him to hit back, and also threw a "softball-sized rock" which hit Trott in the back of the head. He said his client was using the helmet to defend himself against the bigger man.

Mr. Smith replied: "I never hit no one in the face. I didn't throw no rocks."

Trott denies the charge, and the case continues.