A delivery van robber left his victim ‘paralysed’ with fear, a court heard.

Amazon driver Robson Tereza, 42, told Oxford Crown Court how he was approached from behind by two men as he stood by his Vauxhall Vivaro van in Nuneham Courtney on the afternoon of January 4 last year.

More than 100 parcels worth over £2,500 were nabbed in the daylight robbery.

Grant Johnson, 28, has accepted robbing the driver of his 2015-plate delivery van, but claimed the keys were already in the ignition, he was not the one to drive it away and they did not drive at Mr Tereza during the getaway bid.

At a hearing on Monday, Judge Maria Lamb heard the prosecution’s side of the story.

Mr Tereza told the court he was ‘taken by surprise’ by two men coming from behind him. “They held me from behind, they asked for the key,” he said through a Portuguese interpreter.

“They said ‘give me the key’. I was paralysed and I handed [over] the key,” he added.

One of the men, described by Mr Tereza as a blond man and said by prosecutors to be Johnson, was said to have got into the cab and drove away. The Amazon delivery driver grabbed at the door but was hit in his knee and arm by the van as it sped away, he said.

Thomas Davidson, for Johnson, suggested that Mr Tereza had been on the other side of the road delivering parcels when he saw two men get into the van, which had been left idling.

The Amazon man denied the suggestion, protesting that he was not the kind of person to leave the keys in the ignition. He said there had been no passenger in the van as it was being driven away. “He was alone,” Mr Tereza said.

The case was adjourned until October 29, when more evidence will be heard. Once she has heard all the evidence, Judge Lamb will decide how best to sentence the defendant.

Johnson, of Radford Road, Oxford, will also be sentenced for a spree dating back more than two years.

Having broken into a house in Kempsford Crescent, Littlemore, in August 2019 he repeatedly hit a woman asleep in her bed.

The victim, who was in her 60s, broke bones in her face and suffered a bleed on the brain, cuts to her eye and a detached retina.

He also jumped on top of a car in Nowell Road, Rose Hill, splintering the windscreen and denting the bodywork.

Jurors found him guilty of causing criminal damage and burglary but acquitted him of a more serious charge of aggravated burglary.

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