THEFT AND RECEVING.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21214, 20 December 1930, Page 18

THEFT AND RECEVING.

YOUTHS BEFORE THE COURT.

admitted to probation.

(Special to Dailx Times.) CHRISTCHURCH, December 19, Thieving cigarette* and tea from the warehouse where he was employed, Bert John Crew, a store assistant, aged 18, gave the cigarettes to a friend, John Oollinson Hobson, a message boy, aged 18, who saved up the coupons and procured a gramophone. Crew gave the tea to his friend’s mother, Alice Rose: Hobson, of 612 Cashel street.' Both boys were placed on probation by Mr B. D. Moseley in the Magistrate’s Court ,to-day, and the woman was ordered to come up for sentence if called on within six months. Restitution was ordered. Crew was charged with stealing cigarettes valued at £22 15s from T. H. Green and Co., and with stealing 151 b of tea valued at £2 2s 6d. Hobson and his mother were charged with receiving stolen goods. Crew had been employed'by T. H. Green and Co., and had been In the habit of stealing cigarettes and tea, said the chief-detective, J. Carroll. The cigarettes he gave to the boy Hobson, and the tea to Mrs Hobson. Ho was given no money for the cigarettes, and only once was he given 2s for the tea. Hobson saved the cigarette coupons, and with them he procured a gramophone. Crew, however, did not smoke, and the only pleasure he got out of the theft was in listening to Hobson’s gramophone. Both boys were in work, And their employers were agreeable to keeping them in employment. There was nothing pretiously known against any of the accused.

A request was made for the suppression of Crew’s name. “ Ho, I can’t see my way to do that,” said the magistrate. "This is a bad case of stealing from' an employer, but one is just as bad as ’the other. The thefts were committed over a considerable period. They were deliberate and not the result of sudden temptation. It is hopeless. Ho, I won’t suppress the name.”