20 year-old Pasu Pathy Sangaran met his victim, a 40 year-old woman with an intellectual disability, at his job in Changi Airport. Both Pasu and the women worked as cleaners.
Over the course of a few months, he had an intimate relationship with her and stole almost $22,000 worth of jewelry from her family. He was jailed 6 months yesterday for theft, criminal breach of trust and assault.
The first incident of theft occured in December last year when Pasu, after checking that the victim was home alone, went to her house and persuaded him to pass him 2 gold necklaces and 1 gold bracelet worth $11,250. He pawned the jewelry the next day on 26th December without the victim's knowledge and used the woman's SATS pass to act as the guarantor for the transaction. He too had obtained her pass without her knowledge.
On 28th December, he again went to the victim's house while her mother was overseas and asked the victim for more gold and she showed him where her mother kept her jewelry. When Pasu tried to take the jewelry and pawn it, the victim tried to stop him but was slapped in the face. He then stole another $4,000 of jewelry and left the house.
He repeated his actions just three days later stealing jewellery worth about S$6,770 from the victim’s mother, slapping the victim on her face again when she tried to stop him.
In total, Pasu pawned over $22,000 worth of gold jewelry belonging to the family for his own uses.
A police report was made only after the mother returned from her overseas trip. She lodged the report after realizing that some jewelry was missing.
Pasu was arrested in February when he tried to enter Singapore at the Woodlands Checkpoint. He had taken the money he received from pawning the jewelry into Malaysian and used it for himself.
In its arguments to the court, the prosecution showed that Pasu had planned and premeditated on his plan to exploit the vulnerable woman, whose IQ score numbers at 58 - placing her in the Extremely Low Range of Adaptive and Intellectual Functioning test. He had called the woman each time before going to her home and had also taken the victim’s staff pass much earlier in September 2014, shortly after the two met. For his sinister actions, the prosecution sought to slap a 7 to 9 month jail term on the Malaysian.
The defence however stated that the victim was not vulnerable as she had been able to hold down a job as a cleaner for the past 10 years and was involved romantically with Pasu. Adding that Pasu's mother was the sole breadwinner of the family who earns just $800 a month, defence lawyer S K Kumar argued that his client should not be penalized for being unable to pay restitution to the victim's family.
In his sentencing, District Judge Shawn Ho called Pasu's actions "reprehensible", stating that Pasu had "abused the trust of, stole from, and assaulted a vulnerable victim of low IQ".
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