A MAN caught with thousands of pounds-worth of lead which had been stripped from a church roof just hours earlier has walked free.

Andrew Carruthers yesterday thanked a judge as he left the dock carrying a holdall he took to Teesside Crown Court anticipating being locked up.

Carruthers, 38, breached a suspended jail sentence imposed in February last year when he was involved in handling the stolen lead in January this year.

The court heard that he was only five days away from completing the suspended sentence when he agreed to take the roofing strips to a scrapyard for a friend.

Police were called to his home in Loftus, east Cleveland, on January 31 by someone who saw four people loading a vehicle with suspected stolen goods.

It later emerged that the lead had been taken from the nearby St Leonard's Church the previous evening, and would cost a total of £6,240 to replace.

Deborah Smithies, prosecuting, said Carruthers told police he had been offered £15 to weigh in the eight 12ft-long strips worth £780 each.

Carruthers, now of Sunnyfield Gardens, in nearby Easington, admitted handling stolen goods and was handed a community order of 12 months.

The judge, Recorder Peter Johnson, told him: "It is quite clear when you walked into this court you were not expecting to walk out through the same door.

"If you had been directly involved in the theft of that lead, you would have been going to prison."

The judge told Carruthers he was being spared jail because he had made good progress recently and had stayed largely out of trouble for ten years.

Nigel Soppitt, mitigating, said Carruthers had tackled his drink and drugs problems, and said: "He is a man who wishes to change and who has shown he can change."

He added: "He is a little too long in the tooth to be dealing with this sort of thing. He has been foolish and thoughtless to embark on this in the past five days.

"Understandably, he is anxious to distance himself from the theft of the lead from the church. He was told the lead was from a nearby building project. The offer was £15 to weigh it in.

"It seems this man has gone along with it without thinking about it. . . alarm bells should have rung."