Events | 2010.01.11
Detention for youth who attacked woman with bleach
A teenager who squirted bleach over a woman after she complained about noise during a Harry Potter film was placed in detention for a year today and stripped of his legal anonymity.
Jordan Horsley, 16, carried out the premeditated attack after tracking the woman and her family to a restaurant after the film at the Vue multi-screen in Kirkstall, Leeds, and buying a Domestos bottle from a nearby garage.
The victim, Annette Warden, 46, had been "mentally scarred" by the incident, although prompt action had got her to Leeds General Infirmary in time to avoid serious burns, Leeds crown court heard.
The bleach ran down her face and into her eyes and temporarily turned her hair white and grey. She now suffers from sleep problems and is scared to go out without her husband, who was with her and their two sons when the attack happened.
Horsley was one of a group of teenagers who chattered and took phone calls during the screening. Warden had first asked them to be quiet and then called a member of staff, who threatened the group with eviction from the cinema.
Horsley will be released under licence after six months of the detention and training order, imposed by the recorder of Leeds, Judge Peter Collier QC, who drew attention to his "unsatisfactory" previous involvement with social services.
The judge told the court that Horsley\'s father had been violent towards him following his mother\'s death when he was young, but the consequences did not appear to have been resolved.
The Recorder lifted an order he had made earlier under the Children and Young Persons Act which prevented the naming of the teenager. Horsley pleaded guilty last month to causing actual bodily harm to Warden but a jury convicted him of the more serious charge of causing grievous bodily harm.
The judge told Horsley, who received a caution after a previous conviction for hitting a man in the head with a brick, that he accepted that he had originally intended to throw eggs at Warden, but the garage had none on sale. He said: "You have not been well-served in your life by your father and there must be some concerns as to the intervention that was attempted as you were growing up, which never resolved the issues which you still have."
Det Insp Neil Thompson of West Yorkshire police, said: "We will do all we can to catch and convict those whose behaviour impacts on others."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/11[...]-attack-detention-order-served
