Care Worker Caught On Camera Stealing $50 From Pensioner’s Purse Gets Jail Time

A 20-year-old care worker, who was filmed by a secret camera stealing $50 from an 85-year-old pensioner in her care, was sentenced to time behind bars for her crimes.

The carer, Sheryvone Brooks, was filmed without her knowledge taking the money from Evelyn Nicholson’s purse, after her suspicious employers installed a camera in the elderly woman’s home in Stourbridge, UK.

Brooks can clearly be seen in the footage opening the woman’s dresser drawer, while scoping out the room to see if anyone was watching her, and slipping a bill into her pocket with a guilty look on her face.

The suspect pleaded guilty at the Dudley Magistrates Court last month, on one cont of theft and wept in the dock as she was sentenced to 26 weeks at a Young Offenders’ Institute.

The Judge in the case, Martin Walsh, told Brooks at sentencing, “You’re 20-years-old and fall to be sentenced for what was a mean and despicable offence of theft arriving out of a gross breach of trust. You, whilst inside her home address, stole £30 from her purse. The aggravating feature here is not the value of property, it’s the nature of the relationship between you and the elderly person whom you were responsible for providing care for,” he said.

Prosecutor Geoffrey Dann told the court, “Mrs Nicholson is 85-years-old. She lives alone and she is under the care of Gateway Health and Social Care. The defendant was one of the carers who visited Mrs Nicholson’s home on a regular basis. Mrs Nicholson’s family ensured that she had cash and she had some money in a purse which was kept in a drawer in the kitchen. They noticed that money seemed to go missing. They asked Mrs Nicholson if she had given it to anyone and she hadn’t.”

Dann went on to explain how the family of the pensioner installed the hidden camera when they noticed money had gone missing more than once, “On January 6 the company installed a camera with the family’s permission. The defendant attended the address on that day and she can be seen to go to the drawer, to open the drawer and take out the purse. The defendant was spoken to by the deputy manager and she admitted she had stolen the money.”

Brooks attorney, Jason Aris, told the court that his client had faced, “embarrassment and shame” as a result of the CCTV footage of her theft being placed online, saying, “She has shown considerable insight into her offending behaviour. She identified that her actions would have left the victim feeling vulnerable in her own house. The CCTV footage that captures her taken the money has ended up online. This has given her a certain sense of notoriety that she didn’t seek to achieve.”

On top of her sentence, Brooks was dismissed from her job at Gateway Health and Social Care Dudley, as confirmed by a spokesperson there.