Wigan machete robbery spree pair jailed

A shopkeeper’s head was gashed open with a machete and an assistant’s head suffered cuts from a shattered security screen as Lewis Creighton and Joshua Anderson went on their masked rampage.

Bolton Crown Court heard the pair plundered cash, alcohol and cigarettes from the shops in Lowton, Leigh and Tyldesley on the morning of Saturday August 14.

The first raid was on the High Spirits Go Local, on Bradwell Road, Lowton. Before even going in Creighton, 27, of no fixed address, used the machete to shatter the windscreen of a car and warn an occupant not to intervene, then the pair burst into the store demanding money.

When the assistant handed cash over, Creighton demanded more and smashed the security screen with the weapon causing a cut to the woman’s head.

Next the pair raided the Mini Market on Newton Road, stealing three bottles of vodka and attending the till. It was there that the shopkeeper was attacked with the machete and needed hospital treatment afterwards.

Driving a stolen Audi Creighton and 19-year-old Anderson, of Cox Way, Atherton, next moved onto a store on Warrington Road in Leigh, and Elliott Street and Green Street in Tyldesley, taking alcohol, money and cigarettes and a till from the second, but not before the assistant in the last raid was struck several times with the machete.

Earlier victims’ having raised the alarm, the area was soon flooded with police and spotted the pair who fled on foot.

Creighton’s shirt was first retrieved and then he was found topless hiding in a Wendy house in a residential garden where he claimed to be homeless.

Anderson stumbled out of a bush covered in scratches and claimed he had been for a jog. But stolen items were found nearby and both men were arrested.

Creighton was originally jailed for seven years and four months and Anderson six years in a young offenders’ institution, but the judge decided that the sentences he had imposed were too heavy so he called them back to court the next day and knocked a year off each of their terms.

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