The tragic life of teenage mum-of-two allegedly at the centre of suicide banker's under-age sex probe
Shauntelle Went is charged with procuring the two girls, aged 14 and 15, to visit CommBank boss Christopher James McCann, 50, for sex at his Brisbane hotel room.
One of the girls was living in a residential care home supervised by the Department of Child Safety at the time, according to the Courier Mail.
She and McCann were both charged with using electronic communication to procure a child under 16 for a sexual act, and faces a maximum of ten years in jail.
Police allege McCann, from Curl Curl on Sydney 's northern beaches, agreed a price with Went for her to procure underage girls to meet him at the Sofitel on May 14.
Went allegedly waited in the Sofitel's downstairs foyer when the girls went up to his room, but then McCann contacted the front desk asking the girls to leave.
McCann, CommBank's Sydney-based head of health and social infrastructure, was freed on bail to live at a friend's home in Mudgeeraba on the Gold Coast.
Two days later he was found dead at a beauty spot in Springbrook National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland.
Shauntelle Went has had a traumatic life in the years leading up to her being charged for the child procurement case of two underage girls which saw a bank executive take his life
Went was also released on bail, with Magistrate Louise Shepherd telling her: 'You are a vulnerable young 18-year-old woman who was working at the time as a sex worker from a traumatic background.'
While it is unclear when she first became a sex worker, she has had several previous run-ins with police, run away from home and experienced family tragedy.
Her social media reveals she has been sexually active from a young age, giving birth to her first child in 2021 when she was aged just 14, and her second child two years later.
In April 2021, Went's younger brother, Aiden, died after disappearing at the Cedar Creek Falls on the Gold Coast.
The 13-year-old went swimming at 5pm at the popular swimming hole, but did not resurface.
Police drivers pulled his body from the water around 10pm. He and Went's mother, Sherry Carroll, said she did not know how she would recover from the loss.
Went has since posted on social media about the death of her brother, and also admits she struggles with her looks and body image.
She has also spoken online about smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol from a young age.
Shauntelle with family (left) at the funeral for her brother who died aged 13 drowning at a Gold Coast swimming hole. Aiden Braumann disappeared under the water at Cedar Creek Falls in April 2021
In 2022, after the birth of her first child, a baby daughter, Went posted: 'I know that I've made bad decisions in the past.
'But from now on I'm going to be doing whatever I need to do to change to be a better person for myself my family my fiancé my daughter.
'I choose to change, so if any of you want to start drama you will be blocked not interested in the childish crap.'
Last year she admitted in another post that she and her partner were on Centrelink after he lost his job, living with her mother, but otherwise homeless.
She has now hit back at social media trolls attacking her personal appearance and her work on the OnlyFans adult content platform, and to refute the criminal charges against her.
Went responded to the abuse on her TikTok page, boasting that she made $16,000 in two days on OnlyFans 'so I don't give a f*** which (sic) any of y'all have to say'.
'You think I give a f*** about who don't like me? B***h my family don't even like me,' she added.
Went was ordered to live at Brassall near Ipswich under her bail conditions, and left court with her partner Tyronne McTackett, the father of her younger child.
Went is due back in court on the child procurement charge on August 4.
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Is this London's most prolific shoplifter? Romanian mum of three, 20, who police say stole £300,000 of Boots cosmetics by hiding them in the secret pockets of her voluminous skirt
Were there a Guinness Book of Records entry for shoplifting, then surely Bianca Mirica would be in it. How much do you think she stole from branches of Boots across London – always Boots, always perfumes and cosmetics – in just six months between December 2023 and May last year? Answer: £120,000. At least that's what Mirica, 20, a Romanian mother of three, admitted to after she was finally caught, Southwark Crown Court heard this week. But Boots suspect the real figure, police sources told us, was a staggering £300,000 (£299,000 to be exact). You can buy a detached house in some parts of the country for less. One of the 30 thieving expeditions she was convicted of epitomised her modus operandi. The date was March 7, 2024, when she entered Boots in Hornchurch, East London, with a long, flowing skirt with hidden pockets, a 'spotter' to look out for – and distract – security guards, and her own key to open locked cabinets containing the most expensive brands – Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, for example. Value of items stolen: £16,867. Which must be something of a record in itself for the sheer number of beauty products stripped from a single store in one go. But the Hornchurch branch was not her only target. On her way there, she stopped off in Camden, not far from her home in neighbouring Haringey, where she helped herself to make-up and toiletries worth £7,729.93. March 7 was one of five separate occasions during her frenzied crime spree when multiple Boots outlets were hit on the same day. But there is a much bigger story behind Mirica, just one person, remember, working for one Romanian gang, operating in one city. The field is infinitely more crowded, with gangs, mostly run by Romanian organised crime networks, using women to plunder shelves on the High Street. They are part of a shoplifting epidemic which cost the retail industry £2.2billion in 2023 and 2024, an all-time record that equates to more than 55,000 incidents per day. Shocking but not surprising in the circumstances, because under-resourced police forces – the Met alone is set to lose 1,700 staff to help offset a multi-million budget shortfall in the coming year – are unable or unwilling to respond to such incidents. And in outlets up and down the country, it is standard practice for staff not to intervene either, for safety reasons, which means shoplifting has been effectively decriminalised in all but name. Hence the proliferation of serial perpetrators like Mirica. In her 'busiest' month, May last year, she turned up at 11 Boots outlets including the following: May 15, The Strand, (£335.95 of goods stolen); May 19, Haringey (£3,200); May 22, Kilburn (£691.33): May 24, Baker Street (£627.93); May 25, Islington High Street (£2,000); May 29, Regent Street (£4,386). Many native Romanians arrived in the UK after 2014 when restrictions on their right to work – following the country's admission to the EU in 2007 – were lifted. The vast majority contribute to the economy, working in sectors such as hospitality, agriculture and healthcare where it is sometimes hard to recruit British staff. Mirica, who came here around five years ago, was not one of them. She is from a Roma community in Valcea County, a region situated around 100 miles north-west of the capital Bucharest, where she was twice caught shoplifting – 'attempted aggravated theft' is the legal terminology in Romania – on a visit back to the country in 2023, our inquiries have established. Romanian law allows the prosecution of offences punishable by up to seven years in jail to be waived if the cost of proceeding to trial exceeds the gravity of the wrongdoing. The upshot was that Mirica, who is believed to have incurred a fine, was allowed to return to the UK to begin, or at least continue, her crime spree against Boots. The Roma have, rightly or wrongly, been linked to widespread criminality. And the issue of early marriage and early motherhood is an indisputable reality of life for Roma women, with 46 per cent marrying before the age of 18, the European Parliament was told in May, and one in three becoming pregnant in adolescence. Mirica herself is a product of that culture. The only reason she moved, or was perhaps sent, to the UK, it seems, was for the sole purpose of committing crime – and her children, if history tells us anything, would have been groomed to follow in her footsteps. Examples, after all, of Romanian kids being dispatched to rob and steal are not hard to find. Indeed, the annual crime survey by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) highlighted the 'grooming of underage children to undertake theft'. Mirica's oldest child is three, which means she was pregnant for the first time when she was 16. Her second is aged 18 months. Their welfare was the subject of 'intervention, by police and children's social services', a pre-sentence report revealed, after concerns were expressed about their living conditions and Mirica's associations with organised crime. Both are now being cared for by friends and relatives in Romania. Her third child? Mirica appeared with her baby – born on June 20 – in a video-link from HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, where she was held on remand (in the mother and baby unit) before being jailed for 32 months, a prison term reflecting the fact that the judge had little sympathy with her, kids or no kids. Her criminal career provides a glimpse into the burden individuals like Mirica place on overstretched social services, the welfare system – and ultimately on taxpayers. Mirica claimed, through an interpreter, that the things she stole were for personal use – yes, the entire haul, enough to open her own shop. However, the carefully planned raids, including having a key to open cabinets ('universal' keys are available on the internet) pointed to a very different version of events. In fact, Mirica is understood to have operated with around four or five other girls, one of whom is just 16, according to court documents obtained by the Mail. She has three previous convictions, including one for stealing meat and dairy products from Sainsbury's. These resulted in several referral orders, which supposedly involved a programme of activities to address her offending behaviour, as well as a sentence of 16 weeks' detention, suspended for 12 months with a requirement to complete 80 hours of unpaid work. She finished only 40 and was sent nine enforcement letters for 'unacceptable absences'. Her attitude is confirmation, if any were needed, that soft-touch sentencing is failing. 'Your expressions of remorse should be treated with caution and may not be considered sincere,' the judge told her. 'I do not doubt you are sorry you are now in custody. But I very much doubt you are sorry you committed these offences.' Unsurprisingly, back in Haringey, where Mirica lived in a rented mid-terraced household of ever-changing men and women, just a short walk from Tottenham Hotspur football stadium, she is not remembered fondly. 'Mirica walked around with such arrogance in designer gear,' said neighbour James Mulqueen, 53. 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