By Martin Stote
Daily Express, January 4, 2006
A GYPSY thief who drove over a farmer and killed him as he tried to stop him stealing his Land Rover and his dog had been freed early from jail for a similar raid.
Last night the family of grandfather Mick Boffey, 61, said they were "outraged" that career criminal Ashley Squires should have been given his liberty.
He drove at a woman farm worker and Mr Boffey last August as the farmer tried to stop the vehicle in which he had left his terrier Jack.
Squires, 22, and his brother Frederick, 24, who targeted farms for easy pickings, mounted a similar raid two years earlier in which Ashley tried to run down another farmer.
In an evident reference to Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, the prosecutor said that the brothers' crimes were the sort which prompted exasperated people to fight back.
"It is offences of this kind that have driven their victims to desperate acts which have brought the victims themselves before the court on separate acts of murder," Mr Stephen Linehan QC told Birmingham Crown Court.
The brothers had been jailed in July 2003, Ashley for three-and-a-half years. He was freed on license in February last year.
His full sentence would have kept him behind bars until next September.
Yesterday Ashley Squires, who has a long history of previous convictions, admitted Mr Boffey's manslaughter.
His brother admitted conspiracy to steal motor vehicles and assisting an offender. They will be sentenced next Monday.
Afterwards, Mr Boffey's brother Roy, 67, also a farmer, urged the Home Secretary to review the "crazy" policy of allowing criminals out before their sentences had been served.
He also accused the Government of indulging traveller groups because of misplaced, politically-correct policies.
He said: "I have been told that the two offenders were on parole. Michael died at the hands of a career criminal who should have been in prison.
"That just sums up what is wrong with this country. That's what happens if you are soft on these people, they harm ordinary law-abiding citizens."
"I am so angry that my brother is six foot under because so little has been done by this Government.
"They are championed by John Prescott and allowed to keep their camps. These gypsies set out that Saturday morning to steal a car for cash.
"We want to be protected from people who go about thieving. But who Is it this Government is really protecting? It is no longer politically correct to stop them."
Mick Boffey and wife Bernice ran pig and arable Grange Farm, in the village of Withybrook, Warwicks. The Squires brothers, of no fixed abode, targeted seven farms, crisscrossing the countryside in their Ford Mondeo that day.
They spotted the Land Rover's keys in the ignition and Ashley Squires drove off in it.
Mr Boffey and Mrs Christine Russell ran out of the farm office. Ashley Squires drove at them but the woman managed to jump clear
The brothers were caught after another farmer photographed them together in the car the same day.
Both vehicles were later dumped and the Mondeo set alight.
Source: Daily Express Newspaper of Wednesday. January 4, 2006 (paper edition)
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
While I, obviously, do not condone the criminal acts of the Squire brothers, who may indeed be Romanichal (and I am the first one to admit that we do have such criminal elements amongst our People in the same way as does the general population) I cannot see what their ethnicity has to do with it in this article other than, yet again, an attempt of the gutter press, and I am afraid that the Daily Express must be counted in this as well now, of equating "Gypsy" with "criminal" in the eyes of the readers of that rag. Can anyone imagine what the headline "Freed early from jail, the Jewish raider who killed brave farmer" would have cost the paper? But it is OK, I guess to use Gypsy yet again…
