Bronson Cross was apparently assaulted twice while he was in the Alexander Maconochie Centre. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
A burglar has been allowed to leave jail after he joined in the gang bashing of a hotel employee before stealing almost $50,000-worth of items from a Canberra home.
Bronson Cross, 21, was sentenced by the ACT Supreme Court’s Pilot Circle Sentencing List for several offences on Friday (11 July).
Early in the morning of 9 September 2023, Cross was hanging out with others at a hotel in Braddon when a staff member asked him and another person to leave.
Cross called the staff member a “p-h” and a “f-t”, terms which are used as homophobic slurs, before leaving when the hotel’s night manager called police.
The staff member followed the pair outside to make sure they left before a group of people, including Cross, started assaulting him.
Cross punched him in the face and kicked him before the group fled towards Civic on foot.
The staff member said the assault left him with a “permanent mental scar” and he felt confused that simply doing his job resulted in him being physically harmed.
“I have no doubt that the offending caused pain to the victim and unnecessarily frustrated him in the execution of his employment duties,” Justice Louise Taylor said.
“The victim was entitled to go about those duties without risk to his safety and security.”
Then on the morning of 14 October 2023, a man woke up to find his 2015 Subaru WRX STI had been stolen.
Four days later, Cross drove the WRX to a home in Weston, carried a pickaxe when he broke inside and spent two hours rummaging through the house before stealing $47,000-worth of items, including tools and jewellery.
The home’s owner returned to find his family’s belongings strewn through the house and the pickaxe left behind on his young daughter’s bed.
The owner said his daughter no longer felt safe in her own bedroom and had regressed to sleeping in his bedroom each night.
“The offending was a violation of the sense of safety and security the victims were entitled to feel in their own home,” Justice Taylor said.
“Mr Cross spent a period rifling through various areas of their home, including a bedroom of a child where he left the pickaxe.”
Many of the items he stole were never recovered.
The WRX was later found at Oaks Estate before Cross was arrested at his home in the Queanbeyan suburb of Karabar on 26 October 2023.
Cross pleaded guilty to charges that included affray, burglary, theft and driving a vehicle without consent.
He endured a traumatic youth and childhood, started using drugs and drinking alcohol while young and lived in Brisbane for a time before moving to Queanbeyan.
Since being taken into custody at the Alexander Maconochie Centre, he has apparently been assaulted by other detainees at least twice and placed into protective custody.
Justice Taylor said he had shown remorse and had positive prospects of rehabilitation.
“During the sentencing conversation, he took responsibility for his choices and additionally acknowledged the harmful nature of his conduct and its impact on the victims,” she said.
He had spent 479 days in custody by the time of his sentencing.
Cross was convicted and sentenced to almost three years and seven months’ jail, but was allowed to leave custody on Friday to serve a two year and three month intensive corrections order, which is a community-based sentence.
I have a friend with a coffee shop and he is card only. No cash to be pilfered by staff or theft, no… View