Struggled with staff as he tried to leave store

Kevin Doyle broke free from staff who tried to stop him leaving the Tesco store in Falkirk’s Central Retail Park on September 5 and officers arrested him in the car park.

Falkirk Sheriff Court heard that minutes earlier Doyle had been asked to remain in the store by an employee, but when he said he wanted to leave a scuffle broke out.

Doyle pushed the man when he tried to wrestle the bottle from his hand and became aggressive towards him and a colleague before they grabbed hold of him and dragged him to the ground.

The court was told he then managed to break free and was heading across the car park when the police arrived.

Doyle, from 18 Union Road, Grangemouth, appeared in court from custody.

At an earlier appearance the 32-year-old had admitted assaulting Paul McKerracher in the store in the early hours of September 5 by pushing him on the body and behaving in a threatening or abusive manner at the scene by shouting and swearing and uttering threats of violence and had sentence deferred for background reports.

Doyle was already on a supervised community order for another matter at the time of the offence.

Defence lawyer Lynn Swan said: “He was heavily under the influence of alcohol and that features heavily in the majority of his offending.”

Mrs Swan said there was still “some time left” on Doyle’s current CPO and urged the court to give him more time to engage fully with that.

Sheriff John Mundy told him: “I’ve been thinking, ‘do I send you to jail for this or allow to comply with the CPO’?”

Sheriff Mundy opted to allow Doyle the chance to avoid jail - for now.

But deferring sentence until January 25 to allow him to prove he can stay out of trouble and behave, the sheriff warned him: “I don’t want to see you before then.”

At the same court, career shoplifter Ian Kemp (39), 29 Victoria Place, Brightons, was jailed for ten months for theft and breach of bail. The sheriff backdated the jail time to the day of his arrest on October 23.