A SERIAL THIEF who deliberately defecated in the corner of an interview room while being questioned by gardaí has been jailed for 16 months for this and stealing Fairy Liquid tablets.
Alan Stone (33) told gardaí a number of times during his interview that he needed to go to the toilet and the gardaí offered to escort him back to his cell to use the facilities there. He refused to return to his cell but continued to insist that he had to go to the bathroom.
Stone eventually went to the corner of the interview room, pulled down his trousers and underwear, squatted and defecated, using the seal from the interview video tapes to wipe himself.
He was being questioned at the time after stealing Fairy Liquid tablets, worth €16, from a convenience store in the city centre.
Garda John Altendorf told the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that the room was cleared for health and safety reasons and the interview came to an end. The bill for cleaning the interview room came to €131.
Stone of Amiens Street, Dublin pleaded guilty to stealing two boxes of Fairy Liquid Tablets from Centra, Dame Street and damaging an interview room by defecating on the floor on April 28, 2015. He has 165 previous convictions mainly for theft.
Garda Altendorf told Róisín Lacey BL, prosecuting, that it was his understanding that Stone regularly stole the detergent products to sell on in order to fund his chronic heroin addiction.
He agreed with Judge Martin Nolan that it was an unusual way to source income to fund a drug addiction commenting “I have never come across it before”.
The judge replied that it was “new in this court”. He jailed Stone for 16 months adding that if he managed to stay away from drugs he had “a good chance of reform”.
Pieter Le Vert BL, defending, said having read the book of evidence and “the ugliness that surrounds it” he approached his first consultation with Stone with “some trepidation”. But he said his client was both mortified and disgusted by what he had done.
Counsel said Stone’s story was a lesson for “how far someone can fall due to drug use”.
He said Stone had left school with a good Leaving Certificate before working in IT support for a bank following a year at a third level course. He then travelled for some time before returning to Ireland to work in a call centre and then later on an oil jetty in Dublin Port.
Mr Le Vert said in 2008, when Stone lost his job at Dublin Port and his parents separated, his client, who had been using cocaine “recreationally”, graduated to heroin abuse.
He said Stone’s mother would not accept the addiction and “put him out of the house”. He became homeless and found himself in “the throes of a serious addiction”.
Mr Le Vert said it was at that time, when Stone was 26-years-old, that he started to come to Garda attention, mainly due to stealing food and other items that he could sell on.
Counsel said Stone came from an extremely respectable family who were now willing to accept him back into their homes as he was stable on a methadone programme in prison and was due to be placed on an enhanced regime.
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