A woman who sobbed in court after stealing bouquets from the grave of a dead schoolboy has been jailed.
Leanne Slater, 39, left a family heartbroken when she stole the flowers from Durham Road cemetery in Stockton-on-Tees County Durham on June 7 last year.
She later denied stealing the red and white bouquets despite being caught on CCTV, reports Teesside Live.
Teesside Magistrates' Court heard that she intended to sell the flowers on.
Grieving mother Donna Dixon, 45, had visited the cemetery the same afternoon to pay her respects to her son Keiran, who died suddenly in 2012 aged just 14 years old.
She was joined by her loved ones, who shared stories and laid down the fresh flowers to mark ten years since his passing.
But Keiran's childhood friend Jessica Hart told the court that she received a Facebook message not long afterwards containing a picture of Slater carrying two of the bouquets that had been left for him.
She was then sent CCTV of her carrying the items through the town of Stockton and passed this on to mum Donna, who prosecutor Anne Mitchell said identified the location from the photograph and went to find her.
Ms Mitchell told the court: "Donna Dixon then attended the location and found the defendant and detained her until police arrived. She was wearing the same clothing as the female pictured leaving the cemetery with the flowers."
Giving evidence, Ms Dixon said when she saw the picture she got in her car and looked for the defendant. She said: "I saw her wearing the same coat and got out and confronted her. She just denied she had been anywhere near."
On Tuesday, Slater argued with the judge and sobbed as the court heard that she was also in breach of a suspended sentence from a previous offence.
Prosecutor Uzma Khan said that Slater had also tried to steal an elderly woman's handbag while out shopping in Hartlepool on April 10.
The 58-year-old woman, who was attacked in a car park near Fens shops, in Hartlepool, was left with gravel-rash and a sore hip after she was "pulled to the floor and dragged around".
In an outburst on the video link from prison, Slater said: "Will you stop saying she's elderly. She's not 90!"
Judge Christopher Smith muted Slater before telling her: "Taking flowers brazenly from a graveside is a particularly cruel thing to do. This is a miserable case. One can imagine how much grief she felt when she left the flowers at the grave.
"And how much misery you caused when you stole the flowers. You just looked at them and thought, 'I could sell those. I could get a bit of cash.'
"You thought you'd help yourself to that handbag and you dragged your second victim around by it. You've left her shaken and in a degree of misery too."
Slater was handed a three-year and ten-month prison term for the theft of the flowers, the attempted robbery and the breach of a suspended sentence order.
Speaking after Slater's previous court hearing, Ms Dixon told Teesside Live: "It's appalling to even stoop that low.
"It's not nice to steal anything but from a cemetery it's just disgusting. It was such a kick in the teeth the flowers had only been on his garden for half an hour and it was his 10th memorial.
She added that the incident had left her "sick to my stomach" and that "everyone knew where the flowers had come from" as her son was a popular boy.
In 2015, a memorial tree planted at Keiran's grave was also believed to have been snapped in half deliberately in an unrelated incident.
