A pint-sized Dundee thief tried to cycle off with four bags of wine after crawling through a couple’s cat flap.
40-year-old Steven Stewart was brought from HMP Perth to Dundee Sheriff Court to admit a string of offending.
Stewart helped himself to a Dundee couple’s wine stash from their garage after sneaking in.
He was later apprehended booting a car after trying to raid another shed in Dundee.
Stewart, jailed for almost two years, believes his life was saved by being remanded after his drug use had spiralled to a health-threatening level.
Pedalling plonk(er)
Fiscal depute Jennifer Bairner explained a woman living in Lawside Avenue in Dundee awoke at 5.20am to hear clinking and rustling in her garden.
She looked outside and saw Stewart struggling to hold up a bicycle with four bags placed over the handlebars.
The woman asked Stewart what he was doing and he told her he was at the wrong house.
She went inside to phone police and Stewart fled.
After checking her home, the woman noticed her garage cat flap was broken off.
Police discovered Stewart’s DNA on the handle grips of the bike.
Shed targeted
Stewart again disturbed a sleeping Dundee homeowner two months later.
A resident at Rankine Street woke up to find the offender in his garden at 4.15pm on September 25.
He grabbed Stewart but the prospective thief, who had broken into the man’s shed and pocketed the padlock, made off.
The man phoned police and described Stewart as five-foot-two and wearing a tracksuit.
Stewart was later spotted on Black Street kicking a black Chevrolet car after trying vehicle door handles.
Police found him crouched down, hiding, between cars and discovered he had a bail curfew which should have kept him in his Tulloch Court flat at that time of the morning.
Locked up
Stewart admitted the July 18 break-in, during which he stole a bicycle and wine while on bail.
He also pled guilty to breaking into the shed with intent to steal and vandalising a Chevrolet car than night and breaching a bail curfew.
Sheriff Alastair Carmichael jailed Stewart for 22 months, backdated to September 26 when he was first remanded.
His solicitor Jim Laverty said: “Prior to his remand in custody, he was leading something of a peripatetic lifestyle due to unfortunately succumbing, again, to drug addiction.
“There is a fairly substantial break in Mr Stewart’s offending of some five years.
“Unfortunately he advises me that due to a number of cataclysmic family bereavements and family circumstances, he’d begun taking drugs again.
“He has very little recollection of the offences. He tells me he was hopelessly addicted to substances at this point in time and seemed to be existing on a day to day basis.
“This remand in custody may well have saved his life.
“His level of drug intake was of such a level it caused medical difficulties which had resulted in stays in hospital.
“He is grateful that he has managed to extricate himself, with the help of the court remanding him in custody, from the scenario he was in.”
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