Teenager who kicked elderly man into River Mersey while laughing jailed

Benjamin Bridgeman, the teenager who was filmed kicking an elderly man into the River Mersey in April, has today been jailed.

The incident happened at the back of the Riverside Retail Park in Warrington on Sunday, April 25th, with the seventy-four-year-old victim Gordon Bradbury saying he had ‘just wanted to go fishing on a sunny day.’

However, as he stood facing the river, he was approached from behind by two teenagers, one of whom kicked him forcefully into the river as his friends filmed and laughed.

Gordon was thankfully rescued by two teenage girls, Chloe Woods and Ellie Hughes, who happened to be walking past the river when they heard someone shout for help.

Describing the incident, Chloe told ITV News: “We were walking past and we heard these people going, ‘help, there’s a man there’, so me and Ellie quickly saw him and just dropped our stuff and went and quickly helped him and pulled him out of the river.”

In the days following the attack, a then-eighteen year old Benjamin Bridgeman and a sixteen year old boy – who cannot be named for legal reasons – were arrested and charged for the attack, Cheshire Police confirmed.

And today, Bridgeman, now nineteen, has been jailed for ten weeks.

Bridgeman appeared at Warrington Magistrates’ Court to be sentenced this afternoon, Thursday, after pleading guilty to a charge of assault by beating at an earlier hearing.

The sixteen-year-old boy who filmed the attack on his mobile phone and uploaded the footage on Snapchat walked free from court last week after admitting a joint enterprise assault – despite being told he was lucky not to be facing a manslaughter charge, he was handed a 12-month youth referral order.