A man stopped on the A55 with a teenage girl in a ‘onesie’ who had drugs inside her body has been jailed for three years.
David Phillips, 32, picked up 18-year-old Jade Hender in Prestatyn and was looking for a Starbucks when he was stopped by police.
Hender, who had no shoes on, had packages of heroin and cocaine secreted inside her body, and £1,300 in cash was discovered in the car.
Phillips claimed that he had become involved in supplying drugs because he needed to make some quick money, and that his partner’s daughter had recently had to undergo expensive treatment in America for an illness.
Hender, who was 17 when she was arrested with Phillips at the petrol station at Caerwys on March 9, had claimed that Phillips had passed the drugs to her when he realised the police were tailing them.
But at Mold Crown Court, when Judge Geraint Walters said he wasn’t going to accept that claim without hearing evidence, she decided to tell the truth that she had hidden them insider her body herself.
The judge said that both had been used by criminal gangs to ferry the drugs, and that those who involved themselves in peddling illegal drugs “simply wreck the lives of others”.
He said: “All the indications are that people higher up the chain use people like you. Those higher up the chain, criminal gangs without an ounce of morality, who simply do this for their own financial greed.”
He told Phillips, of Cartlon Street in Prescott, Merseyside, that he was “sympathetic to the personal difficulties that you have in relation to your partner’s daughter,” adding: “I would have to be extremely hard not to feel sympathy for you and your family’s plight in that regard.”
Duncan Bould, for Phillips, said that he admitted being a driver when he knew his passenger was in possession of drugs. The cash was to buy construction materials.
Sion ap Mihangel, for Hender, said that it was a stark choice for the court. She was a very young naive girl who had clearly been “used by others more experienced to do their dirty work for them”.
Testimonials spoke very highly of her, and he said she had not realised the gravity of the situation that she had got herself into.
She had done it only the once, had been acting under the direction of others, and had been exploited, he explained.
Hender, of Fford Dewi in Llandudno , wept as was spared immediate youth custody.
She was given a 12-month suspended sentence for two years with a drug rehabilitation order, and made to carry out 180 hours unpaid community work.
see-http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/a55-drug-smuggler-stopped-girl-11251506
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