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)

@Stroganoffo
Yes sorry I phrased it badly. I wasnt suggesting you were excusing it as you had made that clear merely musing aloud that there is no possible justification for what happened to that poor girl. @Kudja
yes it seems you are right and she was competent. I have a child with hydrocephalus who is severely impaired and all the other children I know have had at least some moderate to significant impairments but it seems she was an independent girl who was doing ok until lockdown. What an absolute tragedy. She had access to a phone it seems and I so wish she had called 999 for help. Just so v sad.

Thanks @Stroganoffo - I think we have experiences at opposite ends of the spectrum and I could have been wrong. Just didn’t like the assumptions (I also worded badly!).

Her father's defence seems to be that he wasn't aware of what was going on inside the room. I find it impossible to believe the stench of purifying flesh and the flies only stayed in one room. Clearly the services let her down but her father must think we are all bloody stupid. There is no way he was not aware by the smell and the flies that something very wrong was going on in that room. He just chose look the other way and ignore it, leaving her to suffer horrifically. He even used to send her text messages from the next room telling her to stop screaming because it wasn't good for her asthma ffs.

Putrifying flesh

There will always be a role for social services, because they have an ongoing responsibility to children in need, which includes disabled children. There should have been a care plan in place which should have been regularly reviewed. Questions should have been asked about why this child wasn't in school, given that she would have been entitled to continue to go to school.

A horrifying and very disturbing case, I agree that blame should not be placed only on the parents

It's the other way around. She wasn't starved at all.

Unfortunately the most vulnerable kids didn't go to.school.during lockdown ,my son goes to.a special school all the children are vulnerable and they sll.have EHCP,s yet his schoool.and all the other special schools in my LEA were closed during March 2020-September2020 and only open to.a very limited number from January 2021 -March 2021, despite what the government said about vulnerable children having an automatic right to school ,they forgot about the most vulnerable kids
and not all.disabled children have a social worker ,my son is nearly 13 and we have only been allocated a social worker in the last few months primarily due to.respite .

Social services have been cut to the bone. We used to have a social worker for children with disabilities but due to the cuts (and lack of social workers) her caseload was tripled. She told me that as I appeared to be managing that she was going to discharge me. There definitely aren't the resources to have a social worker keeping a close eye on anyone who isn't deemed at risk.

most disabled children with ehcps have no involvement from social services whatsoever at the best of times.

my child has an ehcp and wasn’t allowed to attend school during first lockdown. Lots of special schools weren’t fully open due to staffing and fact that the children were increased risk as couldn’t social distance. Not being in school wouldn’t have raised alarm bells specifically as lots of disabled children weren’t in school and weren’t allowed to be.

The poor girl was failed all around. sadly she won’t be the only one who was able to slip through the net during covid. The most vulnerable families were left to get on with it and not all will have managed.

support for families with disabilities is pretty much none existant with parents being expected to just get on with it or have to battle for minimal support.

I don't know why the father has not admitted the same charge as mum and his defence of ' I wasn't the best parent' shouldn't be allowed to stand. I really hope he gets a long sentence like mum. Learning difficulties or not. She had maggots. He admits to hearing her screaming and telling her to shut up.
I bet they don't though.

"There will always be a role for social services, because they have an ongoing responsibility to children in need, which includes disabled children. There should have been a care plan in place which should have been regularly reviewed. Questions should have been asked about why this child wasn't in school, given that she would have been entitled to continue to go to school."

In reality none of that happens. The vast majority of disabled children have no ongoing social care involvement. In my area you only have a social worker if your child has overnight respite which is a minority of disabled children. Overnight respite stopped for a year during covid. Many of those families then had no outside support.
Social workers generally did not visit children with disabilities during the height of covid and although mine insisted on visual contact of the child in other ways, this was not universal.

Most disabled children were not offered places in school in 2020. In state special schools it would be mostly children who had a social worker and the social worker pushing for it on behalf of the parents.

In our case we have a disability sw because I begged then complain to head of children's services. I have friends who need a children's with disabilities sw far more than me but can't even get assessed.

Durlockdown ever vulnerable child with a ehcp should been in education. In reality every child in a sen school has a ehcp and not many had everyone in throughout. The laws in place to protect disabled children are willfully broken every day in my county. They mean nothing, they are a total joke. If your savy and have energy you fight and complain. If your not savy and exhausted then under the bus you go. Never was this more so than in lockdown. Thousands of thousands of kids thrown under the bus.

I know it doesn't happen, but it does mean that in a situation like the one described in the OP the fault doesn't solely lie with the parents.

For what it's worth, some duties can be enforced by a threat of judicial review for which legal aid is highly likely to be available.

Yes he's trying to save himself and let the mum take all the blame. Both responsible for what they let happen, at least the mum has admitted her guilt. I hope he gets found guilty and gets a longer sentence than mum, his defence is pathetic

They may have been unable to cope without the structure of routine.

If getting your child out to school is part of your daily routine, it drives decent care of the child.

If your household enters a pyjama day mentality, and you stop getting your DC up and dressed... this could happen. That's assuming reduced capacity on the part of the parents.

You need amazing persistence and ability to get external provision for people with significant disabilities. It's nigh on impossible. You certainly can't ring up, complain it's hard, and get help sent in.

I think SS involvement should have been triggered by the take away diet. As a child with mobility issues, a good diet was even more essential. If they were unable to provide that before lockdown, then there should have been intervention.

Ds was offered a place in school during lockdown but as he was clinically vulnerable he couldn’t go. This will have been an issue for many disabled children who ideally would have been in.

during the first lockdown we had occasional phone calls from school. We where lucky enough that during later lockdowns things where in place for his 1-1 to work with him via teams most of the day.

we had medical procedures missed. We had virtual appointments which needed to be face to face really. Even with me being in the ball some things fell through the net because the holes in that net became so big.

as much as I know it was needed - and we still need to be more covid careful than most now as he is still in the high risk group - the pandemic lockdowns really did mess up things for a lot of people in need. Even more so those who where struggling to cope before

My sons special.school.didn't even phone us for the first six or so. weeks of lockdown ,I was quite surprised I know that it was all bigt rush to.close schools but it took ages to.get anything sorted ,we then had a doorstep.visit ,I guess staff were told they had too physically see the child was ok ,and then for the last few weeks before the summer holiday we had weekly zoom meetings
during the second school closure we had daily zoom meetings .

There will always be a role for social services, because they have an ongoing responsibility to children in need, which includes disabled children.

The vast majority of children with disabilities don’t have a social worker, unless there’s a respite arrangement in place or concerns raised about care. They don’t have the right to check just in case, and many families don’t want the intrusion into their family life.

Services are so cut to the bone that it takes a lot of navigating the system to get minimal levels of support - it shouldn’t be that way but people will keep voting Tory. The end result is families like this left to get on with things with no social care support or health care.

Her father has been found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence

I totally agree they need to be held accountable but I think there are other failings here that noone else bothered to check in/investigate/report concerns. The amount of families that struggled massively with the lockdowns particularly those who lost supports for disabled children was tragic and I think services that shut down completely should also be held to account. I work in a community setting and was out working every day so I don't see why other essential services shut down to such an extent especially in a time when people were really struggling. For some families those services were lifelines and they lost all of that. Not saying that makes this ok- it doesn't- but I think there needs to be wider accountability.

He's been found guilty and rightly so

Kaylea Titford: Dad found guilty of daughter's manslaughter www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-64538142

OP - I completely agree with you.

Whether intentional or not, if someone neglects a child to the point that they die they should be charged with murder.

The parents weren't idiots, they weren't isolated forest dwellers that hadn't visited another civilisation in decades, they were members of society and they KNEW the conditions their daughter was living in were abhorrent, filthy, unhygienic. They KNEW she was severely overweight, had infections and sores. They would have known that the way she was living was unpleasant, painful and undesirable. There was no way they wouldn't have known or could have been oblivious to this fact - they saw how other people lived and were treated in their own lives, in day-to-day life, on the TV, on the internet, there's no fathomable way they weren't aware of the poor conditions their daughter was in and the risk it posed to her health.

They did not live in the same conditions they made their daughter live in because they would not have liked to live the same way, showing they knew exactly how horrible their daughter's existence must have been. There's no way they couldn't have known that the way their daughter was treated would mean she was at risk of dying, but they continued in the same way.

By creating these horrific conditions, allowing their daughter to live in them knowing how horrible they were, the neglect of her health etc, I don't know how manslaughter could be what they were charged with. Manslaughter's definition is:

"Killing with the intent for murder but where a partial defence applies, namely loss of control, diminished responsibility or killing pursuant to a suicide pact."

I can't see any defence (but I can see an intent for murder), there was no loss of control considering they were in full control of what they were doing to their daughter, no diminished responsibility because as parents they are the two adults most responsible for their daughter's welfare and there was no suicide pact. I don't understand.