 |
| Shona & Bruce Lyons |
Bruce Lyons, 91, has been the face of Twickenham’s Crusader Travel for decades and received a lifetime achievement award from The Travel Network Group.
However, a Family Court case resulted in daughter Shona Lyons, 58, receiving a non-molestation order, prohibiting her from contacting him.
She was forced to move out of the family home and into a Travelodge on London Road, Twickenham, but ended up in HMP Bronzefield after multiple arrests.
At her Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court trial last week she was convicted of three breaches of the non-molestation order on December 27; December 29 and December 30, last year.
Shona had already pleaded guilty to breaching the same order on December 23, last year when she appeared in court in custody on Boxing Day.
She was again in custody when standing trial three days ago, telling the court: “I have all my belongings at the Travelodge and I have been in prison for a month now.”
Today, she received four months imprisonment, suspended for twelve months and was ordered to pay £385 costs and a £154 victim surcharge.
The court also made her subject to a three-year restraining order, prohibiting her from contacting her father and going to his home and Church Street office.
Shona told the trial her father was under the influence of others and that she had only visited Crusader Travel to tend the plants outside.
“It is also my office and I was watering the plants. It is a communal garden,” she said from the secure dock. “I tidied them up because they were in a mess and I got all the leaves up.
“I was not going into the business and I caused no damage. I made it better.
“I love my dad and I know he loves me. He is a victim in all this and so am I.”
The court heard Shona was captured on the Crusader Travel security cameras outside the office late at night and once near her father’s home on Eel Pie Island.
She was made subject to the non-molestation order after a hearing at West London Family Court on October 21, last year, where she appeared on a live link and did not contest the application.
“My dad is in an abusive situation. He is a ninety-one year-old vulnerable man and people are abusing him, not me,” Shona told the trial.
“I do not believe the non-molestation order was taken out by him and I have asked the police to look into my dad’s situation.”
She says things changed when her sister and brother-in-law showed up at Eel Pie Island last July.
“He is being coercively controlled. I do not see him in his garden reading his newspaper or on the company website.
“I have worked, washed, cleaned and looked after him and made sure he was a happy person and protected him, but now I am exhausted by all this.”
Shona had a spell in Springfield psychiatric hospital and was constantly told to stop interrupting the court proceedings with her comments from the dock.
She maintained one particular female employee was a malign influence on her father. “She is his jailer at Crusader Travel. He is a victim of cowardly bullies.
“He is being kept a prisoner in his office and his own home.
“I had a brief episode of psychosis in 1992, but that does not give people the excuse to say I’m mentally ill.
“Me and my dad are innocent victims being abused by the criminals. The torture for him seems to be extreme.
“I was by his side for twenty years and did everything for him and now I have been conveniently taken away for protecting him.
“My sister and brother-in-law are now living in the house and I was arrested on a whole load of lies and misinformation.
“I keep being arrested by the police and I wish people could see it for what it is. It’s tortuous for me and my dad, cowardly bullies trying to force him to give them his home.
“For the last four weeks I have been in solitary confinement at Bronzefield. I have been arrested four times and in prison three times.
“I can’t get a toothbrush, a mop to clean the floor, a file to clean my nails or a brush for my hair. I am not a criminal, I’m innocent.
“They are trying to get his house from him and get him to sign cheques. They are victimising him and me for monetary gain.”
Shona was born in the flat above the original Crusader Travel shop, near the current location and worked at the business until, she says, her resignation was deliberately “orchestrated.’
“My five weeks in Springfield may have been brought by my brother-in-law and my time in Bronzefield.
“Money means everything to him and he does not care how he gets it.”
The District Judge ruled Shona breached the non-molestation order out of a “misguided intention to assist her father.”
