Poor, poor woman

[Mookie81]

Complete lack of support and nowhere to turn.
A terrible deed but I feel so sorry for her.
And where the fuck was her ex? Living in Spain while she was driven to despair.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9186243/Olga-Freemans-friends-reveal-agony-trapped-flat-son-loved-dearly.html

I feel sympathy for her. And the child.
There are women who pop up on her every so often describing basically impossible lives caring for their children desperate for help/support/a break.
Nobody can sit as judge and jury until they have walked in those shoes.
What this case should do is prompt an national review, just like Victoria Climbie did, into provision of care for severely disabled children and respite for their dedicated loving parents. I can see how what happened did if a loving mother could not get help and reached a point where she could not look after her child.
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Well, maybe the father walked away because he didn’t trust himself not to snap and potentially do the same thing.

Yes, what a heroic action that was.

They were both let down so badly

I can see how this happens. I have a friend (who is an incredible mother and has fought tooth and nail to get help) who has been completely abandoned by the system to cope with an increasingly uncontrollable child with very complex needs. The father is nowhere to be seen, there is no setting that will take the boy. She’s close to the edge and that’s without the psychosis- although her mental health is shot by the years of sleep deprivation and stress.

Well, maybe the father walked away because he didn’t trust himself not to snap and potentially do the same thing.

If that was the case, he would have had compassion for her at separation and then after the fact. Rather, he sold the family home, moved abroad and, from the looks of his statements to the press, campaigned for her to be sternly punished. So, no, I don't think he left out of concerns for his own mental health.

@ HeelsHandbagPerfumeCoffee but it’s common narrative on here to blame the man, even though in this instance the woman is the one who murdered her child.

I suspect that if the article had been about a man doing the same with no mother present the same posters would be saying that maybe the mother just didn’t feel she could cope and that for her own mental health she had to walk away while this bastard man murdered his child, and the pity would be on the mother still.

What does that say about the value we place on the lives of the disabled that the able-bodied should be pitied for murdering them?

What does it say that as a society we all, including the fathers, can abandon their mothers and then blame them for the consequences without thinking twice about it?

Just awful.

We’d all like to think there are no circumstances under which we’d do these things. The truth is that mental illness does not work that way.

Dylan was in unimaginable distress and his mother was struggling, almost completely alone, with severe sleep deprivation and psychosis.

It is a double tragedy.

@CaramelCandle

Probably in the minority but no. I feel sorry for that poor boy killed by the one person he should have been able to trust.

That one person became psychotically ill due to lack of sleep when the special school her child attended closed because of Covid-19 (she usually slept during the day while he was there). Psychotically unwell people tend not to be fully aware of, and responsible for, their own actions.

And what about the trust the child should have been able to have put in his father?

Or the trust that boy should have been able to have in his local authority to offer severely disabled children some emergency care, pandemic or not?

The fathers role as a parent is completely overlooked in this story. There is no question at all as to why he wasn’t helping more, how often he returned to visit his son and offer respite to Olga. Poor Dylan was let down by both parents, which led to his death. One of them was dedicated to caring for him but was suffering from psychosis. The other...

The news reports state this happened after the parents disagreed about the boy's care. Poor woman seems to have snapped mentally at this point and done the unthinkable. I agree with pp the father abandoned the child by moving to Spain - how
Involved/supportive could he really have been from such a distance. Olga was not originally from the UK so she probably didn't have a family support network around her. Desperately sad situation.

What an awful situation - I'm appalled
by some of the comments here. Nobody is a winner. And just for one minute, imagine the depths someone has reached to kill their own child. They've gone way past rational thought. It's like judging someone for taking their own life.

Awaits the deletion message.

I suspect that if the article had been about a man doing the same

Under the exact same circumstances, he would have been greatly pitied and the mother would have been torn to tiny shreds for leaving.

Those exact circumstances rarely reverse sexes though funnily enough because, speaking quite rightly of the value of every life, women's lives are considered forfeit to the care of any and all disabled or elderly family members.

We need a universal care system, as we have a universal health system. This almost certainly would never have happened had this woman had respite or residential care available to her son.

It is not diminishing the mother's sufferings to point out that every time an article is writing about the killing of a disabled person without framing the disabled person as the main victim, without presenting the disabled person as a person- life becomes that little bit less safe for disabled people in general.

There is already a narrative - and during the stress of the pandemic it's a growing one - that disabled lives are not valuable in the same way as NT lives. That if you have SN, the saving your life becomes less important, so maybe you shouldn't be prioritised. That a disabled person who dies isn't a loss to the world the way an NT person would be. Every little story that frames disabled people as a burden on others feeds into that narrative.

@HeelsHandbagPerfumeCoffee

Posters need to moderate their tone about the father. He’s lost his child. Have some compassion No one knows the circumstances or arrangements they made as a divorced couple He lived elsewhere away from his exwife And son,that’s common. Being located elsewhere doesn’t lessen the impact on him. He’s a bereaved parent. Left with all the what ifs and guilt

He didn't live round the corner and have his child one night a week and EOW as lots of divorced fathers do. He lived a flight away, he didn't bother returning to London to support his son when in lockdown even though he could have (and knew his mother was struggling). Out of sight, out of mind. Yes, I feel for him. He’s lost his child. He’ll forever feel guilty for not being there for his son when his son needed him.

Desperately sad story. I feel so awful for the mother and the child. I have a severely disabled child who attends complex needs school and the pandemic has had an awful effect on the services available to us. People just do not understand the pressure of having a non sleeping severely disabled child.

I also have an older child whose Dad lives in the USA and although it is fairly common for parents to choose to move far away / abroad after a divorce I can never really understand it. Wild horses wouldn’t take me far away from my children. Even more so if they needed additional help and support. It shows a complete lack of giving a shit to be honest. Flame away.

The father moved, not to the other side of town or a neighbouring city. He moved to Spain. Like a PP said, we don’t know the ins and outs of why he wasn’t available to do half of the childcare of this poor little boy but he wasn’t there and she was, and she broke. Hugely sad to think Dylan’s short life was brought to such a tragic end but like others, I have a great deal of sympathy for his mentally ill mother. She’s been failed by her ex and by the local council (who were in turn failed by the lack of funding available for services which might have helped her).

It’s made to feel so impossible to abandon your child when you can’t cope if you are the mum. No flying off to Spain for her. She would have been painted as a most evil and unloving mum if she had taken Dylan to the offices of Ealing child and families social care and left him citing her inability to cope.

It should be made more ethically possible for parents in her situation to insist on respite care when they get to this stage without being judged harshly.

Why was school closed? I work in special education and all the schools I work with stayed open for their most vulnerable.

@corythatwas

I feel sorry for her but I also feel rather worried about the way that a mother killing a disabled child, is always framed as to be about the sufferings of the mother.

The personhood of the child is eroded and he is only presented in this story as a series of noises and troublesome behaviours that tipped his mother over the edge and as then object of her attention. We don't learn anything about Dylan, there is no sense of loss that he is gone from the world.

It's not just this story, it's also the fact that the journalist chooses to situate the telling in a common narrative that is all about the NT person and not at all about the SN person. Every time you join that line, you are feeding into a perception that SN lives don't matter at all.

Yes, I feel sorry for the mother. But it would have been possible to write the story differently while still showing sympathy for her plight. "This is who Dylan was, sadly his mother killed him during a psychotic episode brought on/exacerbated by stress and lack of support during lockdown".

Yes, this is exactly how I feel about this.

*her Dad moved to the USA when she was 4.

I had the same thoughts as a lot of you when I read this.

A tragic, avoidable situation. A family abandoned - by their school, their local authority and their father and husband. How much use was he, from Spain, exactly? He ought to hang his head in shame.

The poor woman didn’t get a charge of diminished responsibility because she was feeling a bit off colour. It would have needed to be heavily evidenced. Neighbours reported hearing howling all through the night, and apparently she normally caught up on sleep during the day while Dylan was at school. She asked for help and received none. Add in an episode of psychosis and I can’t help but feel anything but sorrow for her.

Shame on the feckless father.

Very surprised at some of the comments on here. The mother was ill, why anybody is criticising her for one moment is beyond me.

Exactly what I thought. Where was Dylan's father?? What role did he play in caring for him?

It's easy to say that you love someone while you live hundreds of miles from them and have nothing to do with the relentless toil of looking after them. He should be ashamed. He let his son and his ex wife down, badly.