A bike thief brandished a lock at a security guard to make good his escape, a court heard.

Repeat offender Alan Goodman, 38, broke into a supposedly secure cycle shed to steal a PhD student’s £320 push bike – and brazenly stole two other bicycles in full view of CCTV or a guard.

On Tuesday, District Judge Kamlesh Rana sent the thief’s case to Oxford Crown Court as she felt her powers of punishment were insufficient.

And she warned Goodman that had she been dealing with him, she would ‘probably’ have sent him to prison.

He was bailed to appear before the crown court on September 2. His bail conditions prevent him from being in possession of a bike, tools or being in any area used to store bikes. He must report daily to St Aldates police station in central Oxford.

The magistrates’ court heard that Goodman was caught on CCTV picking the lock of a £450 bike left outside a Didcot Sainsbury’s on April 16 last year.

On June 11 this year he took a £320 bicycle left in a cycle store at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine on the John Radcliffe Hospital site in Oxford. The bike’s owner, a doctoral student, came back to find the bicycle was missing. Goodman was identified from CCTV.

The following month, on July 6, a security guard tried to stop the thief after spotting him use a pipe cutter to steal a bicycle in Keble Road, Oxford.

Goodman swung the bike lock at the guard then ran off with the bike, which had been bought for 750 Euros in Germany in 2015.

The defendant, who admitted theft and common assault, was also in breach of a conditional discharge imposed in February for stealing items from Sainsbury’s.

He was said to have been a drug user from the age of 17 but had been out of trouble for a number of years. He had been forced to move out of his mum’s two bedroom property when she moved to a smaller flat and was now sofa-surfing. He was on a prescription for a substitute for class A drugs.

District Judge Rana committed the case to Oxford Crown Court, as her powers limited her to a maximum sentence of six months’ imprisonment.

Goodman, who gave a care of address of Cecil Sharp Place, Headington, was granted conditional bail.

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