A drug dealer was arrested hiding beneath a toddler’s bed, a court heard.

Delano Johnson, 28, had been sucked back into the illegal trade just months after he was released from prison last summer.

Police arrested him in January after he was linked to a County Lines drug-dealing operation nicknamed the ‘Jungle’ line, dealing heroin and crack cocaine in Oxford.

Prosecutor Anne-Marie Critchley told Oxford Crown Court on Thursday (March 16) that police had raided Johnson’s ex-partner’s home in Buckingham on January 4 and found him hiding beneath what was described as a ‘toddler’s bed’.

A month earlier, Johnson managed to evade arrest during another raid – this time in Oxford. The property was searched, with officers uncovering a ‘drug dealer kit’ of weighing scales, razor blades and wrappings.

The court heard Johnson was a ‘third-strike’ drug dealer. His previous convictions meant he was liable to a mandatory seven year jail sentence, minus a reduction of a fifth for his early guilty plea, unless the judge felt it unjust to impose it.

Ms Critchley said Johnson also had to be sentenced for two assaults on the ex-partner in whose house he was found by the police two months ago.

On December 15 last year, he was said to have struck her in the face and made threats to kill her after she said she was going to go to the police.

Two weeks later, on December 27, he managed to get into the property through the bathroom window, pulled her hair and threw her phone.

The woman said in a victim impact statement that the violence at the hands of her ex had forced her to move out with her children. She was looking for a new place to live.

Johnson, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty at earlier court hearings to being concerned in the supply of class A drugs, possession with intent to supply the same drugs, possession of thousands of pounds of criminally-acquired cash and assault by beating.

Sentencing him to 68 months for the drugs and adding a further two months for the battery offences, Recorder John Bate-Williams said: “Hitting a woman is in my view a completely despicable offence.”

The defendant had clearly failed to learn the lesson most people learnt in the primary school playground, the judge added: “You never, ever hit a woman.”

Kellie Enever, mitigating, charted her client’s difficult childhood. He went to live with his father in Jamaica in his adolescence but returned to London after his dad’s untimely death in 2009. He began getting in trouble as a teenager.

Ms Enever said the dad-of-one had struggled with a lack of any sense of belonging.

When he had been released from prison previously he had nowhere to go and returned to his old drug-dealing ways.

She said her client had felt ‘let down’ by the probation service. However, the probation officer responsible for writing his latest pre-sentence report had spoken to him at length about the support available on release from prison, with Johnson now said to be more responsive to the help offered.

“There comes a point in life that he has to decide what he wants to do. He’s 28, he’s young,” Ms Enever said. Johnson was already completing courses in remand and had put his name down for more.