Schoolboy Bank Robber Sentenced To 40 Months

A fifteen year old “model pupil” has been sentenced to 40 months in a young offenders institution after robbing a bank and being handed over to the police by his mum.

The “top-set” schoolboy held up a branch of Barclays Bank in Liverpool with an imitation firearm and stole more than £2,000.

But his mother discovered the stash while tidying his bedroom and decided to report him after he admitted his crime in a family meeting around a living room coffee table.

The boy, who can’t be named for legal reasons, said he had envied the material possessions of other people.

Liverpool Youth Court heard that he walked into the bank at Breck Road on September 20 and held up two cashiers saying: “I’m not messing around” before handing over a bag.

He said: “Fill that up with money. Don’t do anything stupid. I’ve just got out of prison after five years.”

The cashiers put a “dummy bundle” in the bag which is designed to detonate spraying the cash with dye.

The teenaged robber is said to have acted as if he was in a “real-life video game.”

Defending Miss Teresa Lofthus said: “The boy is polite, courteous, obedient and a role model. Those who know him best are shocked.”

Miss Lofthus told the court: “His home life cannot have been better or more loving. He is an intelligent young man who has shown some educational promise.

“His mother is angry and upset with her son but she feels a strong sense of responsibility. She is in a position in which she never dreamt she would find herself in a million years.”

At an earlier hearing, the boy pleaded guilty to two counts of robbery and one count of possessing an imitation firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.

Passing sentence, Judge Clement Goldstone QC, the Honorary Recorder of Liverpool, told the boy: “However innocent you look now, as you sit in your smart suit, you did not look innocent when you held up bank staff at gunpoint and terrified them.”

The judge said the teenager had planned the robbery at that particular branch because he thought it would be a “soft touch”.

The judge said that after the boy fled the scene he took the money home and “carried on with his young life as if nothing had happened”.

“Two days later, your mother found the money which you had hidden away, and then, later the same day, the gun,” the judge told him.

“It was your mother who bravely and in a remarkable display of public spirit decided to take you to the police station, despite you pleading with her not to.”

Judge Goldstone said the actions of the boy’s mother were “all the more commendable” when he compared it to other cases where some parents were prepared to lie to protect their children when they knew they had committed serious crimes.

He said he accepted the boy’s remorse was genuine but that custody was necessary, not simply to punish the defendant but to “show other boys that, if they choose to commit offences of this kind, they will be sent to detention”.

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Schoolboy Bank Robber Sentenced To 40 Months