Terrifying Walsall shop raid pair are both jailed
Two raiders who smashed their way into a Black Country newsagents with a paving slab have each been jailed for four years.
The front door of Martin McColls's shop in Bentley, Walsall, was smashed and the duty manageress was knocked to the floor in the raid.
Worker Kim Smedley was just about to start work when she saw two men crawling through the smashed hole in the door and one of them, Stephen Keats, ran up and pushed her.
The other raider, Patrick Rafferty started stuffing cigarettes in to a wheelie bin and then marched her into the rear office demanding to know where the safe was. After being told it was on a timer, he opened the cigarette cabinet and passed more packets to Keats.
They made off in a stolen BMW, which they had used in a raid on the Co-op in Penkridge less than an hour earlier on the same night.
Once again the front doors were smashed but they were unable to open the cigarette cabinet and got away only with an empty cash drawer and some postage stamps.
Keats, aged 24, of Woden Road, Heath Town, Wolverhampton, and Rafferty, also 24, of no fixed address, both admitted charges of robbery and conspiracy to burgle. Keats also admitted handling the stolen BMW.
At Stafford Crown Court yesterday Judge David Fletcher told them: "This lady in the shop was manhandled, but it wasn't so much the bruising, it was the sheer terror – she was a woman on her own, 5am on an October morning when it was dark."
Keats, in a basis of plea, denied pushing Mrs Smedley to the ground. His defence solicitor said he had instead tried to reassure her.
The stolen BMW was found in a police swoop on a house in Pendeford, Wolverhampton, following a tip-off from neighbours, only hours after the shop raids on October 2 last year.
Rafferty was found hiding in a child's bed in a rear bedroom at the home of Lee Potts in Wayside and Keats was in the kitchen, along with three bins full of cigarettes. A fourth suspect, Amanpreet Hayre, was arrested on the sofa.
Hayre, 26, of Prestwood Road, Wednesfield, and Potts, 28, of Wayside, Pendeford, both admitted a charge of handling stolen goods. Potts, who said he had no knowledge of the shop raids, admitted a separate offence of producing cannabis and told to do 80 hours unpaid community work.
Hayre, who accepted a charge of assisting in the retention of the stolen goods, was found guilty by jurors of a totally separate offence of dangerous driving at speeds of up to 70mph in Wolverhampton town centre. He was jailed for a total of 14 months and banned from driving for a year.
