Terrified Portsmouth shop worker quits job as knife-wielding drug addict raids store three times

Portsmouth Crown Court heard how Simon Davidson put one woman through torment after first holding her up at knifepoint at Premier Store, in Victoria Road North, Southsea.

But the 36-year-old, of Victoria Road South, returned just days later and burgled the shop – just when the same woman had returned to work and was back again working alone.

Prosecutor Matthew Lawson said she could no longer work at the store and someone else started working in the shop. Davison returned for a third time to carry out his second robbery when this person was working.

In a menacing threat he approached the worker with a bag containing a shard of glass and said: ‘Don’t say a word, I know where you live, I will shove that inside you.’

Davison then opened the till taking cash from inside and tobacco pouches from the display behind the counter.

Mr Lawson said the first incident happened about 9pm on February 21 when the lone woman was working in the shop. Davison approached her with a steak knife in his left hand.

‘The defendant then pointed the knife towards her,’ Mr Lawson said.

Davison, who has 142 previous offences – mainly for theft – demanded she open the till and took £184.

He left and the terrified woman who said she was ‘shook up’ was off work until February 24 when he returned and said: ‘You grassed me up you did.’

Davison walked around to the till and took about £100 at about 11am.

Bridget O’Hagan, mitigating, said Davison had a drug debt and there had been a threat to a family member so he tried to ‘get that drug debt discharged as quickly as possible’.

Jailing him for 64 months, judge Roger Hetherington said: ‘This was a shop from which you had in fact been banned.

‘I don’t doubt the immediate cause of what occurred is because you had a drug debt and you saw this as a way of gaining some money quickly in order to pay off the drug debt.

‘But of course that provides no excuse whatsoever and it must have been an extremely alarming incident for both of those employees.’

Davison admitted two robberies, two charges of having a bladed article and one burglary at the store.