A TESCO supermarket robber has had his lengthy jail sentence extended for threatening a boy with a hammer in a Bradford street.

Andrew Holmes, 42, who is serving five-and-a-half years in HMP Lindholme, had his prison term extended to six years for terrifying the child in Wrose, Bradford, on April 15, 2021.

He pleaded guilty to threatening the teenager with an offensive weapon causing him serious alarm and distress.

Prosecutor Alisha Kaye told Bradford Crown Court that Holmes wanted a word with the boy about an allegation that he had tried to steal his partner’s handbag.

During the confrontation, he drew the hammer and said: ‘My head’s not straight, I’ll use it.’ The boy’s father intervened and no one was injured, Miss Kaye said.

Holmes, whose address was given as the prison, wasn’t arrested until September that year.

He told the police he was working as a builder and had the hammer with him. He did not deliberately decide to arm himself with it.

He said his partner had since died and he had no recollection of the incident and couldn’t recall where he was at the time.

The court heard he was now serving the long sentence imposed in April last year for robbing a branch of Tesco of money in Bradford in September 2021.

His barrister, Laura McBride, said that before these offences, Holme had just one conviction for burglary on his record.

He accepted that he had caused the boy distress in the incident in which he came across him in the street and got out of his car to tell him off.

Miss McBride said that Holmes thought the youth had tried to pull a handbag from his partner and had pushed an elderly lady living locally. His partner had been left in a distressed state after the alleged incident, the court was told.

A month later, she had died and things went downhill. Holmes was already depressed and he became addicted to crack cocaine, heroin and alcohol that led to his subsequent offending.

Miss McBride conceded that he would have received a consecutive sentence if this offence had been dealt with when he was jailed for the robbery.

Judge Jonathan Gibson accepted what Holmes told the police, that he ‘wasn’t right in the head’ when he threatened the boy, who must have been caused serious alarm and distress.

He jailed Holmes for six months to run consecutively with the robbery sentence.