A TEENAGE girl who carried out a knifepoint robbery at a newsagent's was yesterday sentenced to three years in a young offenders' institution.

Durham Crown Court was told that Donna Marie Kennedy pressed a bladed implement to the neck of an assistant sorting magazines at Henry's Newsagents, in Easington Colliery, County Durham.

Kennedy, 18, grabbed the woman's arm, pulled it behind her back and pushed her towards the till, saying, 'Give us the money'.

Ros Scott-Bell, prosecuting, said the assistant, fearing she was going to be killed, handed £120 in notes to Kennedy, who fled the premises.

But she recognised Kennedy as someone who had twice been in the Seaside Lane shop earlier that morning, while a male customer picked her out from security camera footage taken outside.

Kennedy was arrested at a house nearby, and £100 was found under a settee on which she was sitting.

Miss Scott-Bell said the assistant described the ordeal as the most frightening experience in her life, and for several weeks after, was scared to leave her house.

She was unable to go back to work in the weeks after the raid, last September.

Kennedy, of Mansell Crescent, Peterlee, County Durham, admitted robbery at an earlier hearing.

Jane Waugh, in mitigation, said it was "somewhat of a leap in seriousness to the limited offending she has previously committed" and said the death of a friend at the age of 16 had "triggered a downward spiral".

Kennedy became a binge drinker as well as an abuser of amphetamines and ecstasy, and suffered depression and attempted suicide last November.

Judge Richard Lowden said: "Vulnerable newsagents need to be protected.

"This was a premeditated offence, as you went away to get some sort of weapon to terrorise this elderly woman."