(Image: North Yorkshire Police)
A ‘DIRTY old man’ who molested a girl at a North Yorkshire bus station had also groped a woman police officer, York Crown Court heard.
James Yearsley, prosecuting, said the underage teenage girl was sitting with a friend when Wayne Herrington, 47, started talking to her.
When she moved away, he followed and behaved sexually towards her, committing three sexual offences including sexually assaulting her.
A year earlier, he had been given a 16-week suspended prison sentence for sexually assaulting a woman police officer in a separate incident.
Defence barrister Eleanor Fry said the bus station incident was a ‘chance encounter with a stranger’ when Herrington had been drunk.
‘The whole incident lasted a matter of minutes, five minutes,’ she said.
‘It was a dirty old man leching at a young girl while you were drunk,’ the Recorder of York, Judge Sean Morris, told Herrington as he jailed him for seven months.
Herrington, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to causing a child to engage in sexual activity, sexual assault, and sexual communication with a child.
As well as the jail term, he was made subject to a five-year restraining order banning him from all contact with the girl and put on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years.
Mr Yearsley said Herrington was ‘mumbling and looked weird’ when he approached the girl as she was waiting for her bus on a summer evening earlier this year.
He appeared drunk and asked her how old she was.
She told him and moved away to a different bench.
But he followed, and started to talk sexually.
She didn’t initially report the incident, but when she saw Herrington again a few days later in the same town, she became concerned and went to police.
The incident had been filmed on the bus station’s CCTV.
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Ms Fry said Herrington’s behaviour had been ‘entirely inappropriate, entirely criminal and entirely misguided.’
Herrington was genuinely remorseful.
‘He was in poor mental health at the time and really struggles to remember it,’ she said.
He wouldn’t recognise the girl again.
Mr Yearsley said Herrington had grabbed the woman police officer's bottom with both hands when he sexually assaulted her.
Herrington’s memory of the incident with the police officer was that he had touched her hip, and it had happened when he was assaulting an emergency worker.