Plan B Forum

A drug addict stole a mobile phone from a young woman as she lay dying after jumping from a multi-storey car park.

Ben Heney, 23, had gone over to the 22-year-old philosophy student with another passer-by.

But while the other person tried to save fatally-injured Rachel Jardine, Heney knelt down and put something over her phone, which was on the ground beside her. He was captured on CCTV picking up the phone and slipping away.

Yesterday Heney, a persistent thief with a string of convictions for drug offences, was jailed for 12 weeks after admitting theft.



He told police he sold the £150 phone for £20 to feed his habit.

Miss Jardine, who is believed to have been studying for a masters degree in philosophy at Manchester University, died from her injuries after plunging 80ft from the car park in the city centre in the early hours of Wednesday.

It is thought she was using the phone to make an emotional last call to her mother.

Magistrates in Manchester heard that police were called at 12.45am following reports of a woman falling from the car park.

Heney, of Hulme, Manchester, had been spotted stealing the phone by CCTV operators.

A description of him was circulated and he was arrested and jailed within 24 hours.

Officers are now keen to find the phone so Miss Jardine’s family can inform her friends of her death.

Detective Sergeant Mark Astbury, of Greater Manchester Police, said: ‘We come across crimes from time to time that shock and disgust even the most experienced officers and this is one such incident.

‘To deliberately steal from a dying woman instead of offering assistance or comfort is unforgivable.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1MqaxmYco

Just an hour-and-a-half before her death, the philosophy student posted a poignant line from Jean-Paul Sartre to friends through her page on the social networking website. It read: ‘Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.’

Friends and family of Miss Jardine were yesterday too distraught to talk, but an investigation is likely to examine whether she felt under pressure in her master’s course at the University of Manchester. On Tuesday, the day before her death, she had posted that she couldn’t ‘deal with professors that love some students and give them loads of help and are reluctant to even lend me a book’. In another Twitter message this week, the student, from Bristol, had written: ‘I love you Manchester, but you’re bringing me down.’

Also that day she wrote ‘all sorts of things coming to an end today’, including a reference to turning 22, and ‘the slow and painful start of another essay’.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1MwUlKZeq

The Hen wrote:Thank god our culture doesn't have as much to be sheltered from as yours.