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| Man jailed for four years for assault on disabled pensioner Alan Barnes | Man jailed for four years for assault on disabled pensioner Alan Barnes |
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| A man has been jailed for four years for assaulting disabled pensioner Alan Barnes during an attempted robbery. | |
| Richard Gatiss, 25, pushed Barnes, 67, to the ground, breaking his collarbone, while trying to get money for legal highs. | |
| People moved by Barnes’s plight raised £330,000 since the attack in January. | |
| Related: Mugged pensioner tells of amazement at well-wishers’ £220,000 donations | Related: Mugged pensioner tells of amazement at well-wishers’ £220,000 donations |
| Gatiss was sentenced at Newcastle crown court after previously admitting assault with intent to rob. Paul Sloan QC, the judge, said: “I have no doubt [Barnes] was picked on by you because of his vulnerability. It was on any view a despicable offence.” | |
| Gatiss, from Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, was caught after police retrieved DNA evidence from Barnes’s jacket pocket. | Gatiss, from Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, was caught after police retrieved DNA evidence from Barnes’s jacket pocket. |
| He ran off empty-handed from the mugging when Barnes, who is 4ft 6in and visually impaired, shouted for help. | |
| While on remand, Gatiss was kept segregated for his own safety because of the strong feelings his attack caused even among convicted criminals. | |
| Reports of the assault led Katie Cutler, 21, a beautician, to set up a fund for Barnes after he said he was too scared to return to his home in Gateshead. The aim was to raise £500. | |
| The appeal went viral, with many members of the public expressing their disgust at the attack on a vulnerable man. | |
| Barnes has lived with disabilities all his life after his mother contracted rubella when she was pregnant. | Barnes has lived with disabilities all his life after his mother contracted rubella when she was pregnant. |
| He has said he will buy a new house with the money and plans to set up a foundation with Cutler with the aim of raising £1m for good causes. | He has said he will buy a new house with the money and plans to set up a foundation with Cutler with the aim of raising £1m for good causes. |
| Gatiss did not visibly react when he was sentenced. He wept during previous court hearings. | |
| Nick Dry, prosecuting, said Barnes’s disabilities led medics to believe his life expectancy was only nine years when he was born. He was unable to work, but was intelligent and had lived independently. For more than six years, he had lived in a housing complex for elderly and disabled people in a cul-de-sac. | |
| Gatiss had failed to withdraw £10 from a cashpoint when he spotted Barnes outside his bungalow on the evening of January 25. | |
| Barnes said he was aware of a shape coming towards him in the darkness and heard a man demand money. | |
| Gatiss had pushed the top of the frail pensioner’s head, forcing him to the ground, and had rummaged through his pockets, Dry said. | |
| The resulting broken collarbone stopped Barnes washing or eating by himself. | |
| Dry said: “These restrictions he found extremely frustrating, impacting as they did on his fierce independence.” | |
| The bone had since healed well, the court heard. | |
| After he was arrested, Gatiss denied being involved. He had been brought up better than that, he said, then claimed a knifeman made him do it, before confessing when challenged. | |
| Dry said: “He wanted money to buy legal highs to which he had become addicted, then breaking down, he was distressed at what he had done.” | |
| In a victim statement read in court, Barnes said that, in the aftermath of the attack, he felt he could no longer stay in the community where he had lived all his life. | |
| Since then, he had decided to move to a house in the same area – “something made possible by the overwhelming support and generosity of people in the local area and indeed around the world”, the prosecuting barrister said. | |
| Dry added: “Although he is still wary of going out, he is positive about the future and over the worst of the injury.” | |
| Jamie Adams, defending, said it was “an awful case” but publicity surrounding it made it difficult to “keep a proper outlook on what the sentence should be”. | |
| Gatiss was appalled by his behaviour, and made his initial denials to police because of his inability to accept what he had done. | |
| Referring to his drug addiction, he had told the interviewing detective: “I’m not a nasty person, it was bad but I’m sorting it out. You cannot just come off it like that or you will cut yourself.” | |
| Adams said: “He is making reference to those awful drugs, so-called legal highs, he had become addicted to over the past years.” | |
| Gatiss had recently been diagnosed with epilepsy and his medication when mixed with legal highs would have a “deleterious effect”, the barrister said. | |
| When he finally accepted he was responsible for the mugging, Gatiss was remorseful, as acknowledged by the interviewing officer. | |
| Even on the prison bus to court, Gatiss had been “the subject of some pretty awful double-standard behaviour” from other inmates, Mr Adams said. | |
| “Life is not easy for him. He is going to be in the public glare for a long time to come and he knows that. There is a lot for him to deal with.” | |
| Judge Sloan, sentencing, said Gatiss picked his six-stone victim deliberately. “The fact that he was disabled and vulnerable would have been obvious to you,” he said. | |
| The judge hoped the public support Barnes had received had “gone a long way to restore his faith in human nature”. | |
| After the sentencing, Barnes said he thought it was the right length of time and he hoped Gatiss would “do some thinking” while he was in prison. “I’m pleased he’s been sentenced and I think the sentence of four years is just about the right length,” he said. “I hope while he’s in prison he’ll do some thinking and when he comes out he’ll do something useful. Maybe he might decide to help people, which I think would be a good idea for him. “It’s sad that he was brought to the stage of doing something like this - not necessarily just me, it could have been anybody and they might not have got over the incident. “But I’ve moved on, I’m doing something else now, I’m working as an ambassador for the Katie Cutler Foundation, and we’re hoping that the public will support us and we’re also asking businesses to donate to the foundation so we can help a lot more people.” He confirmed his injuries had almost fully healed and he had found a house in Low Fell, Gateshead, that he wanted to buy with the money that had been raised. “My injuries have just about 100% recovered. It was my collar bone that was broken, it was a fracture and it’s just about healed now, I can lift with that hand now,” he said. “I’ve found a two-bed terraced house, with a living room and a kitchen. I didn’t want too big a house, just somewhere small for a base to work from because I can’t stay with my sister forever.” |