Drunk shopper attacked staff in Rotherham Tesco

Jake Mann (24, pictured), of Romney Close, Flanderwell, punched, head-butted and spat at the officers in Tesco Extra on Drummond Street, Rotherham, on July 22.

He was sentenced at Sheffield Magistrates’ Court last Friday to a 12-month community order after admitting to six counts of assaulting a police constable and theft.

He was also ordered to pay the officers £100 each.

Mann had tried to take his own life and, after leaving hospital, he went to Tesco and started his “bizarre behaviour”, the court heard.

He opened “bottles of alcohol and packets of food and started to consume both”, Mr David Marshall, prosecuting said.

Security staff detained him and called the police. 

He was compliant with the first officer who arrived but when others arrived he became aggressive and started assaulting them.

“PC John Bellamy was punched in the face and groin and another officer, PC Daniel Gillies, was headbutted,” said Mr Marshall.

Mann claimed he had HIV and hepatitis C and spat at PCs Liam Woodward, Dan Sawka, Chris Glossop and Sean Dawson, Mr Marshall said.

PC Gillies said in a statement read out in court that he had never, in his time as an officer, seen anyone showing that level of aggression.

He said Mann had left him with a graze on his head which caused him pain and a headache.

PC Gillies said he and his colleagues had to go to hospital to have tests for the diseases Mann claimed to have.

PC Bellamy said: “I come to work each day to help people, to earn money and to support my family.

“I do not come to work to be assaulted.”

Mr Marshall said Mann was “disgusted with his actions” when he was shown CCTV footage of the incident.

Mr Peter Large, mitigating, said Mann was ashamed and had no previous convictions apart from “a long time ago when he got into trouble for carving his name into a bench”.

Mr Large said Mann had a job at the KP factory in Rotherham until four-and-a-half years ago but since then he had suffered ill health and a relationship breakdown.

Mann had tried to take his own life and, after leaving hospitalised, he went to Tesco and started his “bizarre behaviour”, Mr Large said.

Mr William Jenkins, Chair of the Bench, said: “These are a shameful set of circumstances that you find yourself in.

“You are the author of your own misfortune and the one redeeming feature is that once you sobered up you realised what you had done and the gravity of the whole affair.”

Mr Jenkins handed Mann a curfew and ordered him to complete a nine-month alcohol treatment course and up to 20 days of rehabilitation.

q We have been asked to clarify that HIV cannot be transferred by spitting.

Yusef Azad, Director of Strategy at NAT (National AIDS Trust) said: “These police officers have been subject to an aggressive and distressing assault and this is completely unacceptable. It is deeply concerning that, to add to the distress already caused to them, officers are given inaccurate and misleading information on the level of risk they face. There is no risk of contracting HIV from spitting, yet individuals appear to have been advised to take HIV tests when totally unnecessary. There have been no cases anywhere in the world of HIV being passed on through spitting."