AN OPTICIAN has been told he may face jail after being found guilty of committing a sex act while testing a teenage girl’s eyes.

John Gill, of Hunters Way in Selby, was found unanimously guilty by a jury after a five-day trial at Leeds Crown Court to having engaged in sexual activity in front of the youngster at the premises of Clear Vision in The Arcade, Knottingley, West Yorkshire.

He was also found guilty of committing a sex act on a previous occasion while sitting in the window of his opticians.

The court heard Gill, 36, was in a back room with the girl, who had gone to pick up her contact lenses on August 7 of last year. His victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, saw the defendant with his hand down his trousers while she was having the field vision test.

Michael Smith, prosecuting, told the court the youngster arrived at the opticians, where Gill worked with his wife, to find him alone.

Gill told her to try the lenses, on and said she needed further eye tests to check they were suitable.

“He took her into a back room and did a field test on her,” Mr Smith said.

It was while she had her head inserted in the device during this exam that she became aware of something unusual about Gill’s behaviour, who was standing off to the side of her.

Mr Smith said: “She turned her head to see his hand in his trousers’ zipper.”

A video was played to the court of a police interview carried out with the teenager in October 2008.

Speaking about what happened after the test had finished she said: “When I looked at him he didn’t have a happy smile, it was a smile like ‘I know something you don’t’.”

She said Gill told her he needed to check her other eye.

But the girl had become scared by this point, made her excuses and went home to tell her mother.

Two women also told the court at a previous hearing that they saw Gill committing a sex act on himself while he was sitting in a chair in the window of Clear Vision on a date between 2006 and 2007. He was subsequently found guilty of an act outraging public decency.

Gill was released on conditional bail.

He will return to Leeds Crown Court in the week commencing January 18 for sentencing for both offences.

But Judge Rodney Grant said he could not tell him what sentence to expect.

He told Gill, who stood motionless as the jury delivered its verdict: “I have to tell you that no promises have been made to you about the sentence you may receive.”