Small-time crook

If you’re an adult who stands a scant 3-foot-11, it’s best not to steal huge quantities of candy lest the world immediately brand you a rogue Oompa-Loompa. Lee Kildare should have known this but, having been arrested while hauling a garbage bag filled with snackfoods he’d just stolen from a hospital, it’s clear he did not.

That said, scurrying through a broken window to gain afterhours access to the café in northern England’s Tyneside General Hospital wasn’t Kildare’s first foray into crime. Days earlier, he had been put on curfew for squeezing through a hole in the door of an abandoned council house to pillage its scrap metal. And just hours before that arrest, he’d been handed a 12-month conditional discharge for another scrap metal heist.

While Kildare defends his scrap metal scrounging as a necessity borne of the hardships his reduced size has handed him, the candy theft was another matter. “At the time, he was very drunk,” Kildare’s defence counsellor told the courts. Kildare pointed out that a little alcohol can do a lot of inebriating “because of my size.”

Kildare managed to get off with an extension to his existing curfew.

by SCOTT SAXON