Shane Towland was jailed for four years. Photo: Lincolnshire Police
A burglar who ransacked a home in Gainsborough while a family were asleep was jailed for four years on Friday.
Shane Towland, 38, from Doncaster, was linked to the raid at a family property in Ulster Road, Gainsborough.
Entry was forced through the garage with two raiders getting in through a connecting door into the kitchen during the evening of November 18 last year.
Lincoln Crown Court heard a man living at the house looked out of the window at 5.30am and noticed the family’s VW Scirocco was missing from the driveway where it had been parked overnight.
Robert Sandford, prosecuting, said: “He then found the garage door had been forced and his property had been entered and items stolen.
“Somebody had opened the internal door from the garage into the kitchen. Almost all of the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen had been opened and ransacked. He saw that the car keys were missing.”
Mr Sandford said that police checked out CCTV and Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras and saw the Scirocco being driven out of Gainsborough in convoy with a BMW 320 with both vehicles heading for Doncaster.
The BMW was found in the Doncaster area with Towland driving. A search was carried out and a laptop and a mobile phone stolen in the burglary were found on Towland.
Mr Sandford told the court: “The burglary took place jointly with another person then the BMW and the Scirocco were driven back to Doncaster in convoy. It was a planned operation.”
When Towland was interviewed by police he claimed he went to Gainsborough to meet a woman whom he later discovered was a police officer. He denied going to the town to commit burglary.
Mr Sandford said the burglary has had a huge impact on the victims who described themselves as being “crippled” by the effects of the raid.
In a victim impact statement which was read out in court one of the family said their six-year-old son had been left petrified by the burglary which had hugely impacted them all.
Towland, of Docking Hill Road, Doncaster, admitted burglary on November 18 last year and a further charge of theft of the VW Scirocco.
He also admitted two charges of driving while disqualified, two charges of driving without insurance and possession of a small amount of cannabis found on him when he was arrested.
Cheryl Dudley, for Towland, said he had now reflected seriously on his offending and helped to recover the family’s car.
Passing sentence Judge Simon Hirst told Towland the burglary was aggravated by his criminal record and the impact on his victims.
The judge said: “The child of the family is six. He is described as petrified. He cries regularly and checks CCTV before he goes downstairs in the morning.”
Towland was also banned from driving for two years on his release.
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Fantasy Island Skegness has crawled into the ongoing caterpillar cat fight between Marks & Spencer and Aldi by ‘cocooning’ the Crazy Caterpillar ride in solidarity with Aldi.
Supermarket chains M&S and Aldi are currently involved in a legal battle after M&S claimed that Aldi’s ‘Cuthbert the Caterpillar’ cake infringes the trademarks of its own ‘Colin the Caterpillar’.
M&S filed a claim against Aldi in the High Court on April 14, and is suing the budget supermarket as well as demanding that Cuthbert is removed from Aldi shelves.
The company claim Cuthbert shares “substantial similarity” with Colin, and they are pledging to “protect” their Caterpillar cake from plagiarism.
Aldi, which introduced their caterpillar confectionary almost thirty years after M&S did theirs, has been posting a series of memes in response to the lawsuit, demanding that we #FreeCuthbert.
Fantasy Island, the theme park in Ingoldmells, joined in the debate with a tongue-in-cheek move, saying they will close the Crazy Caterpillar ride in solidarity with Aldi and to not offend Marks & Spencer.
The resort created a cheeky post on Facebook with #FreeCuthbert on it, truly showing which side of history it wants to be on.
It’s proved a valuable publicity move for the attraction’s social media page, with more than 4,000 ‘reactions’ to the post.
Around 15% of Lincolnshire’s adult population is now fully vaccinated against coronavirus, health bosses have said.
Lincolnshire County Council’s assistant director for public health Andy Fox said the latest figures showed just under 100,000 people had received their second dose of COVID-19 vaccine – 97,984.
Government figures on Thursday showed that officially more than 500,000 doses of vaccine had been handed out in total with 82,659 of those being second jabs – a rise of more than 15,000
Meanwhile 66.6% of the population have had their first dose – more than 425,000.
“We’re really pleased with where we are with the vaccine in Lincolnshire,” said Andy.
“We know that the NHS teams doing the vaccination has been focusing on the second dose recently so we’ve seen that go up from a few percent a few weeks ago to now we’re 15% of the adult population in Lincolnshire are fully vaccinated, which is again, really good to see.”
Of those that have received their second dose, the highest numbers are in the 80-plus age group with 36,500 people, while 17,000 75-79-year-olds are fully vaccinated.
More than 93,000 people took a lateral flow test last week. The number was expected to go down due to schools – which normally do between 40-60,000 tests alone – being shut, however, it is thought to have been balanced out by people ordering new home testing kits.
There is currently no evidence of the Indian variant in Lincolnshire, confirmed Andy Fox, while the Kent variant is now the dominant strain at 90%.
Lincolnshire’s infection rate continues to decrease, reaching 26.5 per 100,000, and now sitting below the England average of 26.8.
Health bosses are not overly concerned by small rises at district level in Lincoln, or by Boston remaining high on the league table of infection rates.
Mr Fox said the general trend continued to be moving downward.
Forensic tests by wildlife investigators have revealed the death of a bird of prey in Crowland may be linked to a criminal poisoning.
Lincolnshire Police have launched an investigation after a Red Kite was found dead on a piece of land in the area, with a member of public reporting it to the authorities.
The bird was sent off for forensic tests through the government wildlife incident investigation scheme, which concluded that indications suggest it had been poisoned.
As a result of this, Lincolnshire Police’s wildlife crime officers, as well as Natural England, the RSPB and the National Wildlife Crime Unit have carried out searches at addresses in the Crowland area.
During these searches under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, items such as banned pesticides were found, which could be linked to the poisoning offence.
Two people have been identified in relation to this and will be spoken to by officers.
Detective Constable Aaron Flint, Officer in the case has said: “Raptor Persecution is one of the UK’s National wildlife crime priorities and is taken very seriously by Lincolnshire Police.
“These offences will always be dealt with expeditiously and robustly. Deliberate killing of birds of prey is an offence which I urge the public to report if they become aware of it.
“I would like to add, that if a bird of prey is found dead and you believe it is suspicious it should be reported to the police immediately to allow an investigation into its death to commence.
“The bird may have been poisoned which poses obvious health and safety concerns if handled. Providing the police with the What3words location would be extremely useful when reporting an incident”.
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