Junkie behind bars for theft

A HEROIN junkie is behind bars today after he stole four bottles of perfume from an Ipswich department store.

Light-fingered Stephen Blundell admitted taking the Coco Channel bottles worth £185 from a cosmetics counter in Debenhams, Ipswich, and hiding them inside his fleece.

The bottles were left inside a changing room after staff became suspicious, prosecutor Gareth Davies told magistrates.

Blundell, 32, also admitted to attempting to steal a £127 Remington electrical razor from Boots in Ipswich by hiding the object inside his jacket and walking out the store.

The court heard he breached a drug treatment and testing order imposed in March this year, which was his punishment for breaking into AJ Rawlings in the town's Northgate Street.

Mr Davies said: "He smashed a window of the premises and took a flat screen computer monitor. The reason he was caught was because some blood was left at the scene."

Magistrates heard Blundell he made a good start to the order but started using heroin again after he was evicted from his former home and moved into the YMCA.

Craig Marchant, mitigating, said: "This is a man who had an addiction to heroin for a number of years.

"He had tried by his own means to stop that addiction. He was losing his battle and in January and the early months of this year he was quite a pathetic character.

"He was thin and quite clearly unhealthy."

Although Blundell started to do well on the order, completing a third of it. He fell back into his old ways after he moved into the YMCA at the start of July because of "too much temptation."

Magistrates jailed him for a total of 13 weeks.

He was re-sentenced to six weeks imprisonment for the burglary.

Magistrates also jailed him for six weeks to run consecutively for attempting to steal the razor and six weeks to run concurrently for attempted theft of the perfume.

Blundell, of Bramford Road, Ipswich, was given a further week in jail for not surrendering to the court as soon as practical, which he admitted.