No bail for Leon Elton and Kylie Pobjie on charges of looting south coast business
A couple accused of looting from a fire-ravaged south coast business are behind bars tonight after being refused bail at Wollongong Local Court. Leon Elton and Kylie Pobjie are accused of breaking into the shop to steal electrical goods twice.
NSW
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This is the couple who allegedly ransacked a shop that was torched in the Batemans Bay bushfire crisis, driving two hours in smoke to plunder electrical equipment worth hundred of dollars.
Plumber Leon Elton, 38, and girlfriend Kylie Pobjie, 31, were today refused bail at Wollongong Local Court on charges of twice breaking into the NSW south coast shop to steal electrical goods.
Appearing via video link this morning, the pair was denied bail by the magistrate as the court heard Elton was charged with larceny, entering a building to commit an indictable offence and possessing a prohibited drug.
Young mother Pobjie was charged with larceny and entering a building to commit an indictable offence.
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“Kylie has made her own bed but she’ll come good when she’s ready,” her brother James told the Sunday Telegraph.
“She’s a lovely girl but she’s lost her way at the moment.”
Friends of Elton say his parents, who run a leather shop in Tilba Tilba, were devastated to learn of his arrest on Friday.
“He comes from good stock and is a really good person, but things have gone wrong for him recently,” one close friend said.
“A lot of this friends won’t talk to him anymore, he went to Darwin for a few years working and fell off the rails.
“He came back home to Tilba three years ago but lost his home, his $70,000 land cruiser UTE, all his hard work went down the drain.”
Officers arrested him at his home in Tilba Tilba, on the south coast, after seizing electrical goods at two homes on Friday afternoon.
Pobjie was arrested in Narooma later that evening.
Police will allege the pair broke into a fire-damaged business twice on Wednesday to plunder electrical goods.
Both are scheduled to appear at Bateman Bay Court on Monday.
NSW Police deputy commissioner Gary Worboys said hundreds of officers were deployed on the NSW south coast to stamp out looting in the wake of the bushfires.
“If people want to steal, if people want to skulk around in the fire grounds and get up to mischief, we have a visible police presence and we have police in plain clothes and we have aircraft in the air that are looking over these grounds,” he said on Saturday.
“It is quite clear that if people want to behave like that, they will be caught and they will be arrested. No one will tolerate it.”