'Karma' as Fareham charity tin robber breaks both legs leaving him registered disabled

Robert Parker grabbed the propped-open fire door at the Golden Lion pub in High Street, Fareham, as he stormed inside looking for anything to fund his habit.

Portsmouth Crown Court heard the lone cleaner inside ran away backwards while putting barstools in the way of 37-year-old Parker.

CCTV footage played in court shows the moment the woman - untouched by Parker - smacked her head on the ground while he stole a Rowans Hospice charity tin containing £20 from the bar.

The devastated woman has been right with an inch-long scar above her right eye, a ‘constant reminder’ of the robbery on February 16, 2020.

‘I’m terrified, I never go out alone,’ she said in a statement. ‘I felt scared at the time as I never knew what he was going to do.

‘It was just an awful experience and I can’t believe it happened to me.’

So awful was the effect on the 5ft 2in woman that she left her job and another at Cams Hall Estate Golf Club as she didn’t want to work alone.

But in an act of what Parker’s own lawyer suggested might be viewed as ‘karma’ the robber himself suffered significant ‘life-altering’ injuries months later.

Police had gone to arrest him at HMP Winchester for the robbery while he was serving time in jail for other matters after the robbery.

He ran away, jumped over a wall and broke both his tibia and fibula bones below the right knee with multiple fractures and is now registered disabled.

‘She might think there was a bit of karma there,’ his barrister Simon Walters said.

Parker has 97 previous convictions. In prison he has quit all of his drug addictions and is now medicated on methadone alone.

After learning of his victim’s trauma, he told his barrister: ‘I can’t say sorry enough.’

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Parker was on licence for a 58-month sentence imposed in 2016 when he carried out the robbery - and went on a spree in November 2019-2020.

The judge, Recorder Elisabeth Bussey-Jones, said she acknowledged Parker is ‘deeply ashamed’.

But jailing him for 24 months she said: ‘This was a lone woman working on her own in a pub where she should have been in a safe environment.’

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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