To think that neglecting your child to death should be murder (warning: distressing content)

[Onnabugeisha]

I’ve been following the news on the horrendous murder of a vulnerable disabled girl, Kaylea Titford who died at age 16 due to the neglect of her parents.

TW Distressing Details
Kaylea was born with spina bifidia and hydrocephalus. She was a wheelchair user and had no mobility in her lower body. She was fed takeaways five nights a week until she became morbidly obese. Her parents did not ensure nutritious food or that her exercises were done. When the lockdown happened, her mum put to her bed and then left her to die. Kaylea tried to keep clean- they found milk bottles of urine around her bed and soiled puppy pads she was told to use for poo on the floor of her room. She was left unwashed, in soiled clothes & bed linen, with live maggots and flies crawling across her due to ulcerations from being obese and filthy. Six months later, she died in that bed. Only after her mum was sure she was dead did she call 999 for the paramedics who entered the nightmare of that room to the stench of urine, excrement and rotting flesh.

Her mother has plead guilty to manslaughter by gross negligence. Her father has pled not guilty and his trial is ongoing.

This was obviously a premeditated and planned campaign to slowly kill Kaylea in one of the worst and most degrading ways imaginable. I don’t understand how it cannot be murder. It seems to me it takes more evil intent and cruelty to slowly kill a child over six months than in six minutes.

Neglect has long been taken less seriously than physical or sexual abuse imho, even though it technically kills just as many children.

AIBU to think the charges should be murder, not manslaughter?

YANBU= should be murder
YABU= it’s manslaughter (accidental or unintended death)

I'd assume it's to do with the likelihood of them getting a conviction for it, with it being harder to determine premeditation. Having spent the bulk of my adult life working in front line child protection the amount of cases I've worked where clear intentional abuse took place and the Police NFA'd it as the CPS didn't feel a conviction would be possible. Shaken babies where they wouldn't prosecute because there were two potential perpetrators, a toddler with 39 non accidental serious injuries NFA'd by the police.

I had a child with the most horrendous injuries I'd ever seen after an assault from mother or step father, after 3 months of investigating the DI rang me to say NFA as they couldn't evidence clearly enough that they'd intentionally done it and that they wouldn't even be pursuing neglect. I hold little faith in justice being served in cases like this.

It's an incredibly disturbing case and the parents were obviously culpable because as well as not caring her Kaylea's hygiene needs they were presumably responsible for bringing her the food which allowed her to balloon in weight? Apparently they were ordering takeaways five nights a week?

However this case does also speak to the fact that some parents are simply not mentally or emotionally or physiclaly up to the task for caring properly for a disabled teenager and this is why we have social services...we just don't know what all the factors and dynamics were in that household. For me it is more an indictment on the folly of total lockdown which resulted in many many vulnerable children and young people slipping through the cracks.

Whilst I agree with you, this supposes that the parentsvhad the mental capacity to arrange something like this. It's not just about intelligence but about social conditioning. As is often the case I suspect there are many things that just didn't occur to them.
Very sad all round

It isn't that lockdown turned otherwise good parents into neglectful parents but more that it hid neglectful parents and their children from people that could of flagged it and it's allowed kids to slip through the cracks and result in cases like this. No one thinks that every disabled child was failed during lockdown including by their parents, there have just been multiple cases where lockdown hid abuse and it has resulted in death.

It isn't that lockdown turned otherwise good parents into neglectful parents but more that it hid neglectful parents and their children from people that could of flagged it and it's allowed kids to slip through the cracks

It also tipped some families who were just about coping over the edge as supports weren’t available in the same way or at all. So the things that might have both helped things stay on an even keel and served as an early warning system just weren’t in place.

Definitely murder. The parent knew that level of neglect would eventually kill Kayla. So it was premeditated.

Hope they rot in hell.

Broadly I'd say it's not murder because inaction is not the same as intent. Neglect doesn't prove an intent to kill. Allowing someone to die through your inaction is not the same thing as deliberately taking action to kill them.

However - I do think the rules on murder should be relaxed. There should be a lower burden of proof needed to convict someone. If you break into a house you thought was empty and end up killing someone because they tried to fight you off, that should be murder. If your crime directly leads to a death, as in if you hadn't broken the law they'd still be alive, that should be murder. There'd be exceptions obviously for things like speeding because the act of driving is not in itself a crime, in contrast to breaking into a house to steal stuff is.

I think the joint enterprise rules should be relaxed too. If you know someone regularly carries a knife without legal justification and don't report it, you should be guilty of murder if they subsequently stab someone to death. It shouldn't just be the pack of thugs who enabled the stabbing, it should be the parents etc who could've called the police but didn't. The same thing would be true if you knew someone was drink-driving and didn't report them.

The most important thing though should be the sentencing guidelines and possible punishments. Right now murderers usually won't be imprison for life - genuine whole life sentences are reserved for only the worst offenders. I'd like to see genuine life sentences being the standard for murder (I'd really like to see the death penalty, but a lot of people get upset at even the idea of bringing that back) - no possibility of parole. The good thing about whole life sentences is that you'd not need to worry about rehabilitation or prison conditions. Mail could be censored and visits prohibited, so there would be no way prisoners could get information out about how bad conditions were. They'd be thrown in there, what happens happens, and when they die their bodies are used for medical experiments or placed in unmarked graves.

I think that there is more to this than has been reported. Her parents may have learning disabilities for all I, or the public know.

I don’t think so. The charges are manslaughter due to gross negligence. Mother has pled guilty, father is undergoing a trial.

If they were LD or of low mental capacity, the charges would have been manslaughter due to diminished responsibility? I’m not an expert but that’s usually what you see when a person has such conditions…it’s diminished responsibility.

Have nothing to add about legality but this is the worst thing I've read in a very long time. So utterly utterly horrific 😢

I read he “didn’t know what to do” and even after they found her body, he rang his mum because “she’d know what to do”.

as you say, more unsaid than said.

The good thing about whole life sentences is that you'd not need to worry about rehabilitation or prison conditions. Mail could be censored and visits prohibited, so there would be no way prisoners could get information out about how bad conditions were.

Seriously? That's absolutely horrendous.

As for this case, it's absolutely appalling. Though like others I wonder if other things were going on, as it seems odd the poor girl went from being well cared for (apart from diet, but presumably her parents were also eating takeaway five nights a week) to such a horrific level of neglect.

RomeoMcFlourish · Today 08:19
Completely agree with you OP. The only true justice would be to allow her parents to suffer the same fate. But as that can’t happen, life sentences for murder should be handed automatically for neglect on this scale.

No, that is revenge, not justice.

OriGanOver · Today 08:22
This is awful. Utterly awful. I wonder if someone from the police/cps could explain why manslaughter and not murder - will it make a difference to sentencing?

Lawyer here
Murder must premediated (malice aforethought) and the killing unlawful (eg doctors withdrawing treatment would be lawful)
Manslaughter tends to be charged where the police cannot prove that death was intentional, rather the perpetrator was reckless to it happening

The full facts may come out in dribs, and drabs. Was anybody aware that she was being fed takeaway everyday? That alone should have raised an alarm. There are always so many questions, and so few answers, it would seem.

I think there is fair chance on the basis of some of this evidence that the parents may have had some seriously limited ability. Neglect cases can certainly be motivated by cruelty, but often, you can have people with low IQ.

There is no indication of an intent to murder. Imo it is good that murder is a complex matter.

However, the sentencing of manslaughter (which covers so much variable conduct) is very difficult. Manslaughter is a common law offence which is being used to cover huge numbers of cases because it is easier to convict where there is not direct intent.

Youth stabbings are often classed as manslaughter. The man who beat his girlfriend to a stupor, claimed it was sex game and left her at the bottom of the stairs intoxicated and dying. Manslaughter. The boys who dragged the police officer behind the car to a certain death. Manslaughter.

The issues in these cases is clear. It is the prosecution case which makes concessions early on to secure the conviction. Sometimes it is clear that the better lawyer is for the defence, and the targets of the CPS encourage this outcome to a degree. Getting a conviction for manslaughter is good enough.

In sentencing, legal changes could be made to address manslaughter. It would be very different and difficult but it could be done.

The circumstances are so hard to read. The poor girl. No one who has allowed her to suffer like that could be mentally well surely? Parents of disabled children are often under incredible pressure with little respite. I’m not saying I get it but on a human level I can see that some people might burn out. Had social services been previously involved?

’I know the law says it’s not murder, but I think the law is wrong and should be changed. It’s not right that a dead child has to have bruises and broken bones for it to be murder, just like it wasn’t right for women to need bruises and broken bones for rape to be rape.’ For a death to be murder it requires a mental element. That you intended your actions/inactions to cause the victim to die. The defendant here has agreed to plead guilty to gross negligence, the police will likely have agreed not to pursue a murder charge because it would be difficult to establish the mental element was there.
Re your comments on rape, not sure where you have gotten the idea from re bruises etc. do you mean people being questioned why they did fight back? If you think women in the past had to demonstrate injury to prove rape you are wrong.

If you think women in the past had to demonstrate injury to prove rape you are wrong.
Im not wrong, that’s how it used to be. The #1 advice we were given as girls was to make a rapist “beat the shit out of you” otherwise the sex would be deemed consensual based on what we were wearing, how we had behaved, the fact he was our boyfriend/husband. You wouldn’t even get to a trial.

You are are now broadening the terms of what you originally said. It wasn’t advice from the police was it? You are talking about what is legally required to prove a crime.

? How else should I respond to the person saying that women didn’t have to have bruises or broken bones to prove rape in the past, when we most certainly did. Just with a “nope you’re wrong”? I’ve chosen to explain how it was…that’s not broadening anything. That’s giving an explanation to probably a much younger woman who has no lived experience of 20th century rape trials.

I think, just to take a step back, that the fact they fed this child, even though her circumstances were depraved, makes it rather difficult to say murder.

It would be easier to say, yes, murder, they beat her, or inflicted by their actions harm which caused her death. There are such cases.

But they did not do that. The indications are that they did something. And they did not inflict physical harm. Where those cases exist, neglect, being locked in a room, turning to physical harm being meted out, well you have your murder case.

The nasty truth is that of course, it may be death by other means. But I do not think they will prove that beyond a reasonable doubt, which is what has to happen.

I agree with you.

I wonder if the cps were sure they would get a manslaughter conviction, and less convinced they would get a murder conviction.

They’ve probably gone with a manslaughter charge due to a lack of evidence to ensure a conviction of murder, or the defence have cooked up a decent enough excuse so that it would’ve stirred up too much doubt in the jury to convict.

I’m not happy with it, but we don’t know the ins and outs of the case. If they can’t be sure of a murder conviction then CPS will go with manslaughter to ensure some sort of conviction is made.

I haven’t voted because it’s heartbreaking. It is considered manslaughter though.

Sounds like the parents had lack of support from reading the posts, but still no excuse. If they were struggling that badly it would’ve been better to take her to A&E and leave her there to be cared for, rather than die like this.
Awful.
I haven’t read the article.

It's such a distressing case. That poor girl.

Agree. It's so awful though. So easy for people to just fall off the radar.