A pensioner sexually assaulted a schoolgirl on a bus in Hyndburn while suffering from a ‘manic episode’, a court heard.
David Pickup touched the thigh of a teenage girl and tried to engage the victim and two other school girls in conversation about ladies’ underwear.
Burnley Crown Court heard how Pickup, 65, had only been released from a psychiatric hospital only a few months earlier and was ‘significantly unwell’ at the time of the incident.
He pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault and was given a two-year community order with a 50-day rehabilitation activity requirement, nine-month alcohol activity and mental health treatment requirements and he was made subject to police notification requirements for five years. Richard Archer, prosecuting, said the victim was sitting at the back of the bus with two other school girls when Pickup boarded the bus and went to sit between them holding a can of beer and a lit cigarette.
Mr Archer said at one point Pickup ‘brushed the thigh’ of the teenage girl before she moved her legs away as it ‘made her feel uncomfortable’. The court heard how Pickup then claimed to know one of the schoolgirl’s mothers however one of the girls replied ‘no you don’t know my mum, my mum wouldn’t know someone like you’.
Another schoolgirl then said her boyfriend was getting on at the next stop and would ‘batter’ him.
Mr Archer said Pickup then started talking to the girls about underwear and ‘if they knew about girl boxers, knickers or g-strings’.
Two of the girls then left the bus and the victim went to sit next to another woman who said ‘there are some right weirdo’s on the bus these days’. The second count of sexual assault relates a separate incident in Blackburn.
Richard English, defending, said Pickup, of Aberdare Close, Blackburn, had already been remanded into custody for eight months and was ‘extremely ill’ at the time of the incident.
Judge Beverley Lunt said Pickup suffers from a ‘severe and enduring mental disorder’ and it was a ‘manic episode’ but he is now ‘stable’.
Sentencing, she said it was an ‘unpleasant incident’ and that ‘sometimes you (Pickup) don’t help your own mental healthy by drinking alcohol’. She said Pickup, who has 24 convictions for 47 previous offences, had ‘never behaved in this way before’.
