Man Given Conditional Discharge After Putting Sugar in Wife’s Gas Tank

By Alric Lindsay

A 73-year-old man has been given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay compensation after admitting he put sugar in his estranged wife’s car, damaging the engine.

Henry Mcallan Harris appeared before Magistrate Murray in the Summary Court today, August 5, 2026, to be sentenced for damaging property, being his wife’s vehicle, by putting sugar in the gas tank.

The court heard that the couple, both retired and married for many years, are now in the midst of divorce proceedings.

Reportedly, on May 16, Harris telephoned his wife to ask whether she had taken $3,000 from their joint bank account. She confirmed that she had, telling him the bills had to be paid and that he had not paid them since March.

The $3,000, the court heard, was money the couple had set aside for a family trip to Panama with their young grandson.  However, amid the divorce, his wife had removed it from the joint account.  It was that withdrawal that prompted Harris’s call.

Some time later, the couple’s son was driving his mother’s car when it began to cut out and stall, and he abandoned it along Collier’s Beach in East End. When his mother went to retrieve the vehicle, she found brown sugar in the fuel tank, and reported the matter to police.

When interviewed, Harris admitted putting two spoonfuls of sugar into the tank. He said he had done so because his wife had withdrawn money from the account without his permission, and said he was willing to pay for the damage. The repairs and towing came to about $1,895.18.

Harris, a man of previous good character, entered an early guilty plea; his attorney Oliver Grimwood described it as something done in a moment of emotion.

Magistrate Murray accepted it was a one-off act committed in a moment of heightened emotion rather than a planned offence, and said a fine would serve little purpose in the circumstances. The court granted a conditional discharge, on condition that Harris commit no further offence within 12 months, and ordered him to pay about $1,895.18 in compensation on or before November 6, with three months’ imprisonment in default. He was given time to pay as he is due to leave the Cayman Islands.