A thief who sprung the lock on a hospice doctor’s £3k electric bicycle a week after he was due to be sentenced for a spree of other cycle thefts has been jailed.

Alan Goodman, 38, stole the doctor’s Cube bicycle – worth £3,376 – while she worked at the Sobell House hospice in Oxford on September 7.

Oxford Crown Court heard that police managed to track down both the bike and Goodman after the owner activated an in-built GPS tracker. The bike’s front panner had been damaged and the rear toddler seat ripped off.

Jailing him for 30 weeks, Recorder Emily Formby QC noted the thief had shown no remorse for his victims and said only an immediate prison sentence would match the seriousness of the offending.

She said: “I have spent time thinking about everything that has been said on your behalf this morning trying to consider what the best sentence to pass is to reflect your offending behaviour and...the drug addiction that sits behind your offending.”

After being told he was going to have to pay £260 compensation to the doctor, Goodman said from the dock: “She got her bike back, your honour.”

Goodman was sentenced for a series of bike thefts committed over almost a year-and-a-half.

On April 16, 2020, he was caught on camera picking the lock of a £450 bike left outside a Didcot Sainsbury’s.

Prosecutor Sandra Beck said the defendant was identified from CCTV and, when arrested, told police he’d taken the bike as he thought it belonged to a friend – then dumped it in an alleyway when he realised his mistake. The bicycle has never been recovered.

On June 11 this year he took a £320 bicycle belonging to a PhD student left in a cycle store at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine on the John Radcliffe Hospital site.

A month later, on July 6, a security guard tried to stop the thief after spotting him use a pipe cutter to steal a bicycle in Keble Road. The guard shut the door to the bike shed in a bid to trap Goodman in, but the thief managed to barge his way out then swung a lock at the guard as he fled.

Goodman was bailed at the magistrates’ court in August and his case sent to the crown court for sentence.

But he failed to turn up before a judge on September 1 and, six days later, stole a Cube bicycle worth £3,376 from outside the Sobell House hospice in Oxford.

The thief also admitted breaching a three month suspended sentence imposed in 2018 for stealing a £3,000 bike from city centre shop Bike Zone and a conditional discharge for shoplifting and assaulting a Sainsbury’s security guard.

Mitigating, Emma Hornby said her client’s life was ‘blighted’ by drugs and he had been addicted to heroin and crack cocaine for the best part of 20 years. He was working with addiction charity Turning Point and since being remanded in custody earlier this month had got himself back onto a prescription for a class A substitute.

She said Goodman, then homeless, failed to turn up to court on September 1 as he thought he had coronavirus symptoms but couldn’t tell his solicitors or the court as he didn’t have credit on his phone. He later established he did not have the virus.

Goodman, of Cecil Sharp Way, Oxford, pleaded guilty at earlier hearings to theft, common assault and criminal damage. He has almost 80 offences on his record – more than half of them for theft or dishonesty.

He was given 22 weeks for the latest thefts and another two months on top for breaching his suspended sentence.

Alan Goodmans police custody shot Picture: TVP

Alan Goodman's police custody shot Picture: TVP

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