A shoplifter accused of killing a man at a Fife store claimed that she was not aware that he was a security officer at the time of the incident.
Nicola Gordon told a court that she had never previously met Bill Ireland before he approached her at the Rejects shop in Kirkcaldy on January 6 2023.
Gordon, 37, said that at the time she went shoplifting to fund her drug habit.
“I was addicted to heroin and crack cocaine,” she said.
Gordon told the High Court in Edinburgh that Mr Ireland got a hold of her by the “scruff of my jacket” and pinned her into a wall.
She said: “I started panicking. I was wriggling.
“I did not know who the man was. He still had not disclosed to me he was a security guard by this point.”
“I have been caught shoplifting before and I have never experienced anything like that. It was more confusing than anything else. It all happened so fast,” she told her counsel Michael Meehan KC.
Drug habit
Advocate depute Alan Mackay asked Gordon how much her drug habit was costing her per day at the time of the incident and she replied; “Hundreds of pounds.”
Gordon, who described herself as an ex-addict, accepted that she stole four tins of paint from the shop on January 6 in 2023 and a friend had also taken knives from the premises.
She said of Mr Ireland: “I didn’t know he was security. I thought he was an ordinary member of the public because that has happened to me before.”
Gordon and her mother, Teresa Gordon, 59, both of Kirkcaldy, in Fife, have denied that they committed the culpable homicide of Mr Ireland, who was the head of security at the store.
It is alleged that they assaulted Mr Ireland, then in the course of his employment, and struggled with him, behaved in an aggressive manner towards him, repeatedly struck him on the legs with a zimmer frame whereby he sustained a cardiac arrhythmia, fell to the ground and died.
The mother and daughter had faced a further charge of stealing tins of paint and knife blocks from the shop in Kirkcaldy on January 6 in 2023 while acting with another but were acquitted of the charge after the Crown withdrew it.
The trial before Lady Ross continues.
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