John Culatto
A COURT has sentenced a teenager to over a year in prison after he broke into four popular eateries and a tobacco shop in Gibraltar during a five-day burglary spree.
Ben Brown, 19, of Willis’s Road managed to steal nearly £2,500 from the The Seawave, Charlie’s Tavern, Flavours of India and The Lounge.
Police officers caught the troubled teen with a chisel as he tried to break into Tienda de Reina tobacco shop in Ocean Heights.
In court, he pleaded guilty to the burglaries from September 24 to 28 and a charge of ‘going equipped for stealing’.
CCTV cameras caught him breaking into the Lounge at Queensway Quay during that time.
He took £2,324 in cash from those five premises and caused £2,210 in damage during the break-ins.
The Magistrates Court sent Brown to 30 weeks in prison for each of the burglaries that would run at the same time.
But the man had made an audacious attempt to burgle the International Police Association Bar and The Lounge restaurant last year.
So the court added on another 20 weeks from the suspended sentence he got for those two burglaries.
That brought up his total sentence to 50 weeks and 20 days at Windmill Hill Prison.
In a court case a few days later prosecutors showed how he had owned up to trying to breaking into the Three Owls Bar in August.
Brown had tried to smash a glass pane on one of the doors but he as he tried to climb in slipped and seriously cut his ankle and leg with the shattered glass.
As he fell to the floor, he dislocated his knee and lay there until the police arrived.
“I did it, I was trying to rob this place,” he told officers as they arrested him and took him to hospital to get patched up.
They later charged him with burglary and going equipped to steal.
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