A BURGLAR was tasered as he tried to make a getaway after he and his two accomplices were caught red-handed stealing £66,000 worth of power tools from a Rugby builders’ merchants.
The break-in at Travis Perkins in Somers Road was the third raid the team had carried out on the same day, loading their haul into a stolen van, a judge has heard.
The three men all pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to all three of the ‘serious commercial’ burglaries.
Terence Maughan, 27, of Bestwood Road, Nottingham, and Douglas Ward, 30, of no fixed address, were both jailed for two years, but Martin Ward, 34, of Slapton Road, Little Billington, Leighton Buzzard, was given a shorter 20-month sentence.
Prosecutor Mohammed Hafeez said ‘a significant degree of planning and organisation’ had gone into the burglaries on Sunday March 21, which all involved the use of the van on cloned plates.
After taking a tool box and £8,000 worth of power tools from a storage unit in Attleborough and a tool supply company in Swadlincote, they moved on to Rugby where they broke into Travis Perkins and began loading the van with power tools.
But, unknown to them, an alarm had been set off alerting the police, who arrived while they were still loading the van.
Martin Ward got out of the van, which had been stolen in Surrey in February, and tried to make a run for it, but was caught and arrested, as was Douglas Ward.
Maughan jumped into the driver’s seat and tried to drive away, and had to be Tasered before being arrested.
In the back of the van, the officers found power tools worth £66,960 from Travis Perkins, together with the tools and toolbox from the earlier burglaries.
Mr Hafeez added that Douglas Ward had 68 offences on his record, including 22 for ‘theft and related matters’ and a firearm offence for which he was given five years and four months in 2011.
Maughan had ‘a record not dissimilar, beginning in 2005,’ including burglaries, and was subject to a community order at the time, but Martin Ward was of previous good character.
Jailing the three, Recorder Adrian Reynolds told them: “You are all men, you’re not boys. You don’t go out in a van with more than one set of cloned plates on the spur of the moment.”
“You stole goods worth, in round figures, over £75,000.
“Someone was going to make a lot of money out of this. This was serious organised commercial crime, and I have no alternative other than to reflect that by locking you three up.”
