A healthcare boss mocked a young woman with Tourettes before telling her "people like you shouldn't be let out".
Paul Halliday, 52, called the woman a 's**z' and used hand gestures to mock her after she brushed past him at a supermarket.
The woman, 24, was so badly affected by the shocking incident at Morrisons, in Bacup, that she has started to suffer seizures, a court heard.
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Blackburn Magistrates Court heard how the woman was visiting the supermarket with a friend when she had an involuntary arm tic and brushed past Halliday. He immediately turned on her, launching a tirade of abuse and smacking one hand against another in the playground taunt used to imply someone is disabled, reports Lancs Live.
The woman's friend stepped in to help, but Halliday ignored her and carried on until a member of staff threatened to bar him. The incident was captured on CCTV but Halliday, who runs a company which provides disability aids, denied threatening behaviour.
The court heard the director of Halliday Healthcare Ltd, admitted using the word 's**z' but denied any further words or behaviour which could cause alarm or distress. He was convicted after a trial.
Speaking following the hearing, the woman's mum said: "It just beggars belief that someone would act like that in this day and age. It has been really distressing.
"This shouldn't have happened to my daughter. It was a hate crime."
She said her daughter had been unable to leave the house for a year after being diagnosed with a functional neurological condition. The condition causes her to suffer involuntary vocal tics and body twitches, and can cause her limbs to get stuck in certain positions.
"There is a direct link between her tics and stress", she said.
On the day of the day of the incident, she had taken the brave move to go shopping in a neighbouring town with a friend, in a first outing since her diagnosis. But her treatment by Halliday has affected her confidence and caused a change in her condition, her mum said.
"It is all made worse by the fact he works for a healthcare company", she said. "The whole thing has been really distressing and he has dragged it out for as long as he could. He had more than one opportunity to admit what he had done.
"My daughter was not able to go to the trial but really wanted to go to the sentencing. A few days before she lost the mechanism to speak. Her words wouldn't come out.
"She now has multiple seizures every day, which never happened before this incident. Developing a neurological condition in her early 20s has been distressing enough, but to be subjected to this kind of treatment by someone who should know better is appalling."
Halliday, of Meadows Avenue, Bacup, was handed a six month curfew and ordered to pay £200 compensation, £650 costs and a £95 victim surcharge.
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