Three years jail for burglar who preyed on elderly and cancer victim
A burglar who preyed on vulnerable residents – including a cancer victim – stealing cash to feed his drug addiction has been jailed for three years.
Daniel Perry knocked on the doors of people in the Walsall area on the pretext of doing work for them, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.
Perry, 30, called at a woman’s first-floor flat in Caldmore Road, on October 3 last year, offering to clean her gutters to raise money for a funeral, said Mr Howard Searle, prosecuting.
“She was 62 and suffered from cancer, which was obvious because she didn’t have any hair, but he asked her and she told him,” said Mr Searle.
The victim agreed to give him £5 but as he wrote out a receipt, he asked for water and when the woman returned, he was gone. She then discovered £25 was missing from her purse.
Five days later Perry called at a house in Weston Street, Palfrey, offering to take away a mattress left in her front garden.
The 69-year-old victim gave him some ‘small change’ in payment, the court heard.
But he knocked her door three times more asking for string and scissors to help tie up the mattress, and on the last occasion he stole her purse while her back was turned, it was said.
She called her bank to block her cards but he had already spent £126.
On February 1, Perry visited the home in St Lawrence Way, Darlaston, of an 83-year-old pensioner with disability problems and agreed to clear guttering for £60.
The court heard he took the cash uninvited from the kitchen and left without doing any work.
Seven days later he called at the home in Breedon Way, Pelsall, of another 83-year-old man, again offering to do guttering.
He was given access to the garden but left empty-handed when the pensioner’s granddaughter turned up.
Perry, of Lewis Street, Walsall, pleaded guilty to four burglaries. Defending, Mr Adrian Harris said Perry, who had no previous convictions, had worked all his life but developed a problem with crack cocaine following the break-up of a four-year relationship.
He was jailed for a total of three years. Judge Amjad Nawaz told him: “This involved low levels of value but given the victims’ ages and vulnerability they are more affected by these small amounts than other individuals, and that is the tragedy of this.”
