A teenager who acted as muscle in a mugging outside McDonald’s is currently serving an eight year jail term for wounding and robbery, it can now be revealed.

Hayden Field, now 18 but just 15-years-old when he committed two robberies in Oxford city centre in July 2020, was given the lengthy custodial sentence by a judge at Woolwich in London for offences committed after the Oxfordshire matters.

The teen, who in the eight years since passing the age of criminal responsibility has chalked up a rap sheet of almost 30 offences, was not at Oxford Crown Court to see himself sentenced on Monday (September 19).

He had refused to leave Portland Young Offenders’ Institution, where he is currently a serving prisoner, to attend his trial on the 2020 Oxford robberies.

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Through his barrister, Peter du Feu, he said he did not want to be moved to a new prison and risk losing his spot on important rehabilitative courses.

Sentencing him in his absence to 18 months detention, trial judge Recorder James Hay told the empty dock: “Hayden Field has been found guilty of two counts by this jury of what were described his co-defendant, [Aaron] Clarke, as mean and nasty offences; effectively bullying boys younger or smaller than him in order to assist in stealing mobile phones.”

Field was with two other teenagers, all known to each other from their time in the care system, when they targeted boys in Oxford city centre on July 3 and July 5, 2020.

The first mugging saw a teen boy ordered to hand over his phone outside McDonald’s in St Aldates.

The boy and his pals had been followed from the Westgate shopping centre, with Field swapping his ‘slider’ flip flops for a pair of trainers before the robbery was carried out.

One of the robbers, who is still 17 and cannot be named for legal reasons, hinted that he had a knife.

The boy’s phone was later returned to a friend of the victim, who had followed the robbers to Radcliffe Square.

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Two days later, a different teen boy was targeted.

The underage robber, who we have named Youth A, told his victim that he would ‘back out the shank’ – slang for knife – and warned he would be stabbed in the chest unless he handed over his Huawei mobile.

Youth A, from north London, attended court for the first day of his trial before skipping the second and third days.

He initially claimed to have got on the wrong train and ended up in Birmingham by mistake.

He returned to court on the fourth day of the trial, when he pleaded guilty to the two counts of robbery. A third count of attempted robbery was dropped.

The judge sent his case back to the youth courts in London for sentencing.

Aaron Clarke, now 20, of Dene Road, Oxford, who had been 17 at the time of the robbery, was cleared of two counts of robbery.