A HEROIN addict who ransacked his mother’s home and sold on the high value property he raided from the address to pay off a drug debt has been jailed for three years.

Antonio Dimeo conceded that what he did was “as low as it gets,” his barrister Rebecca Young said today.

He smashed his way into the three-bedroom Bradford house on November 29 last year to steal items including a piano, two television sets, £1,400 in cash, a laptop, a computer tablet and a hairdryer, prosecutor Ken Green said.

Mr Green told Bradford Crown Court that Dimeo also raided her detached garage, making off with power tools.

He sold her piano at Cash Converters for £100 and she bought it back for £199, the court was told. He said he had sold other items of her property “everywhere.”

A relative who discovered the burglary found a rear door and window smashed and “stuff all over the place.”

Dimeo said he had needed money “otherwise he was dead.”

He had 25 previous convictions for 50 offences, although nothing for burglary.

Dimeo, 37, was sentenced on a video link to HMP Leeds where he was remanded.

Miss Young said he took full responsibility for his actions and was deeply, deeply ashamed. He said himself that it was as low as it gets and unforgivable.

He was using heroin from his teens and ran up a debt to his dealer. He had now cleared that and he was building bridges with his family.

He welcomed a prison sentence to seek the help he needed to wean himself off drugs.

Dimeo was a former construction worker and he hoped to obtain similar employment on his release to make recompense to his mother.

Recorder Sam Green QC said Dimeo was already a committed thief when he “stooped to an all-time low” and burgled his mother.

“Mr Dimeo, violating your own mother’s home and helping yourself to an eye-watering amount of her possessions is as low as it gets,” he said.

He had deliberately targeted his own flesh and blood and helped himself to a vast array of her worldly goods.

Dimeo had no previous convictions for house burglary but he was “a serial and unrepentant thief” and old enough to know better.

Recorder Green did, however, accept his genuine remorse.

He received concurrent sentences for an offence of commercial burglary and a matter of shoplifting.