Louise Harris (Image: South Wales Police)
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A woman hired through a Facebook advert to sit with a frail pensioner overnight has been sent to prison after drinking a bottle of vodka she found in the 81-year-old’s fridge and then subjecting her to hours of screaming abuse.
Louise Harris, 42, of Cwrt y Waun, Rhydyfro, Pontardawe, was jailed for three months at Swansea Crown Court. She admitted being a care worker who ill-treated or wilfully neglected an individual, and a separate count of criminal damage.
How she came to be in the house
Prosecutor Abud Hussain explained that the pensioner had come out of hospital the previous December. With social services yet to arrange a care package, her relatives turned to Facebook and posted an advert seeking a “day/night sitter”.
Harris, who had once lived next door to the family and was known to them, answered it. She told them she had worked in the care sector, and it was agreed she would cover evenings and nights.
The night of 13 February
The two women were alone at the pensioner’s home when the elderly woman knocked her Lifeline button by mistake, triggering an alarm and a call from the monitoring centre.
That appeared to “anger” Harris, the court heard, and she rounded on the woman as she lay in bed. Over the hours that followed she branded her a “horrible cow”, said she hoped she would die in her sleep, and demanded again and again: “Where’s your money? Where’s your money?”
At one point Harris dropped to her knees beside the bed and laid her arm across the pensioner’s chest, leaving her in “pain and discomfort”. She later took a knife into the kitchen, brandishing it and breaking items there.
How it came to light
The alarm was raised by the pensioner’s daughter, who logged into a security system at the property and could hear Harris “shouting, swearing, and mocking her mum”. She rang one of her mother’s neighbours, who went round and found Harris drunk and abusive.
Officers who attended discovered the defendant “slumped on the floor”. Interviewed afterwards, Harris told them she was a recovering alcoholic and had drunk a bottle of vodka taken from her client’s fridge. Her memory of the night stopped there – the next thing she recalled was coming round in a police cell.
What the victim said
In a personal statement read out by the prosecution, the pensioner described lying helpless in her bed while she was shouted and screamed at, and said she believed she was going to die. All she had wanted, she said, was to be left in peace to sleep, but Harris had gone on screaming and shouting at her. The experience, she said, had spoiled the memories she held of the family home she had lived in for around 60 years.
In court
Harris entered her guilty pleas from the dock. She had also faced an allegation of attempted robbery arising from the same night, but the Crown offered no evidence on that count and a formal not guilty verdict was recorded. She has no previous convictions.
Andrew Evans, defending, said no one could have foreseen how the evening would unfold. His client had “succumbed to temptation” on spotting the vodka in the fridge, he said, and was truly sorry for conduct she recognised as “wholly unacceptable behaviour”. While accepting the case passed the custody threshold, he urged the judge to draw back from sending her straight to prison.
Sentencing
Judge Huw Rees said older people were entitled to be treated with “respect, dignity, and humanity by everyone”.
He told Harris her conduct towards the pensioner had been “heartless and cruel” and that she had shown a “callous disregard” for the woman’s welfare. She had, he said, betrayed the trust her family had placed in her, and nothing short of immediate custody would do.
After a one-third reduction for her guilty pleas, Harris was jailed for three months. She will spend 40% of that term behind bars before being released on licence to serve the rest in the community.
