Shocking CCTV has emerged showing a 51-year-old thug sucker-punching a five-year-old and hitting an 11-year-old from behind.

Jeff Hardcastle has been jailed for nine years for attacking the boys as they played video games inside a department store in August this year.

Footage shows Hardcastle calmly walking towards the 11-year-old and smashing him in the back of the head.

He then walks over to the five-year-old and punches him in the face, sending him flying onto the floor of the Target shop in Lodi, California.

The 11-year-old then rushes in to help, carrying the younger boy to safety following the unprovoked attack.

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Police told CBS Sacramento that Hardcastle appeared to be high on drugs and had been acting oddly inside the store.

CCTV shows him wandering through the aisles before attacking the boys.

He was hunched over in a chair at one point before he was arrested outside the shop.

After the attack, witness Amber Burchfield told CBS Sacramento that one of the children was crying.

She said: “He was screaming for a pretty long time. It was loud and it was ringing through the whole store."

Hardcastle was sentenced to nine years in prison.

He pleaded no contest to assault and causing great bodily injury to a minor.

He also pleaded guilty to a robbery that happened in 2008.

US state laws allow a defendant to plead no contest when they neither dispute nor admit to a crime.

It is not an admission of guilt.

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