Locations
Woodstock Road, Summertown, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX2
Description
A brazen pervert who groped a woman in full view of CCTV cameras in the city centre McDonald's has been jailed.
Neil Shorter’s trail of inappropriate touching saw him twice target the same member of staff at Littlemore Hospital, where the 53-year-old was detained as part of a court order imposed for earlier sexual offending, and attempt to sexually assault a lone woman in a Didcot charity shop.
The charity shop offence was committed on the same day as his lunge towards a female student’s legs in the McDonald’s restaurant in Cornmarket.
Those final sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults, which were committed on November 30 last year, came just days after he was discharged from Littlemore Hospital.
This was after a doctor questioned whether the defendant was in fact suffering from the mental health problems that had resulted in him receiving a hospital order at Truro Crown Court the previous year.
Jailing the Oxford man for 18 months on Wednesday (April 5), Judge Ian Pringle KC said: “Many would say that I ought to take a course of action today which would result in you getting some help – some treatment.
“You’ve got two previous convictions where you got help or treatment. Certainly, when at the hospital you were being helped and treated.
“And it’s made no difference to you.
“I not only want to do something which will cease your behaviour in the future – this sort of behaviour – but I also have a duty to protect the public and I’ve come to the conclusion that only a prison sentence in your case is appropriate.”
Earlier, prosecutor Matthew Knight told Oxford Crown Court that the first of Shorter’s three victims was assaulted at Littlemore Hospital, where she worked as a member of the care staff.
He made her and other members of staff uncomfortable. He would ‘look them up and down’, often licking his lips while doing so, and made lewd and ‘suggestive’ comments.
On April 27 last year, the woman was required to conduct checks on him before he was allowed out of the hospital on ‘escorted leave’. As she did so, Shorter grabbed the woman’s bottom, Mr Knight said.
Two months later, on June 26, he ignored her warning that it was out of bounds and walked into a sports equipment cupboard – brushing past the victim’s body in what he later accepted was a sexual assault.
On November 30, around a week after he was discharged from hospital, he was caught on CCTV staring at a woman in the Cornmarket McDonald’s before walking behind her and making a grab for her leg.
Later the same day, he was in a charity shop in Didcot. Video footage from inside the store showed him ‘targeting females by his gaze’ before, eventually, making a grab for a lone woman while no one else was present.
Shorter, of Woodstock Road, Oxford, pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to three counts of sexual assault and one of attempted sexual assault. He was last before the courts in Truro in 2021 for sexually assaulting a woman in Falmouth.
Mitigating, Gareth James asked the judge to impose a suspended prison sentence with requirements to work with the probation service in the community, saying it would protect the public ‘far more effectively’ than sending his client to prison.
He said Shorter had ‘evident difficulties in his thinking’, as shown by his sexual behaviour. It appeared Shorter was suffering from some form of early onset dementia and was an alcoholic.