A TEENAGER has been jailed for “squalid” sex with an underage girl and putting her younger friend in hospital with a cannabis overdose.

Jacob Ben Cuthbert, 18, ignored a police warning before plying the older girl, 14, with alcohol and having unprotected sex with her on a garage floor, said Peter Hampton, prosecuting.

“He told her afterwards she might want to take a pregnancy test,” said Mr Hampton.

He also defied a ban on contacting girls under 18 by giving her 13-year-old friend so much cannabis she returned home heavily intoxicated and had to be taken to hospital. She suffered no long-term effects.

Jailing Cuthbert for three years and four months, the Honorary Recorder of York, Judge Paul Batty QC said: “He is a very fortunate young man that he wasn’t charged with rape.”

He told Cuthbert the 14-year-old girl had regarded him as a good friend and trusted him.

“You repaid that trust that she had in you by having sexual activity and sexual intercourse with her in the most squalid condition on the floor of a garage.”

He described the supplying of her friend with cannabis three days after Cuthbert had been released on bail with a condition to stay away from girls under 18 as a “significant and troubling aspect of the case”.

Cuthbert, of Riverside View, Norton, pleaded guilty to sexual activity with a child and supplying cannabis. He had no previous convictions and will be on the sex offenders’ register for life.

Reading a victim impact statement from the older girl, Mr Hampton said she had been shunned by former friends and others in her neighbourhood since she went to police and felt as though the unprotected sex was her fault.

For Cuthbert, David Camidge said he was a young man whose background included “criminality in the family” but had avoided offending in the past.

Mr Hampton said Cuthbert got to know the girl through Facebook and police had warned him about the way he was behaving towards her a month before the sex act. “Numerous” people including the girl’s mother had told him that she was 14. But on April 21 she told police that about a month earlier, he had met her in a garage where he had given them both lager he had bought. Then he had closed the garage doors, encouraged her to perform a sex act with him, taken off her lower clothes and had sex with her.

When she wanted to leave, he had got agitated and thrown her mobile phone against the wall.

Cuthbert was arrested on April 23 and admitted the offence. Three days later, he committed the cannabis offence.