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’m glad he has been found guilty. He initially said that he had left all responsibility to the mother and, while he had admitted to being lazy it wasn’t his fault. Media reports at first said that he was on trial for allowing his daughter to become morbidly obese. While that’s bad in itself they didn’t detail the terrible criminal neglect. It sounds as if while she was in school she was well enough cared for not to trigger child protection services. Things deteriorated badly during lockdown which wasn’t seen. Both parents are equally and completely responsible.

Bloody disgusting it's the parents fault but also services. I work in inpatient settings and the amount of times I heard no visits because of COVID, I worked throughout the pandemic with ppe many of my community colleagues stayed WFH which put many vulnerable people more at risk.

We don’t know that she had been referred to any services - it seems she was going to school and doing well (independent, playing basketball) before lockdown. The family clearly had equipment in place (hoists etc). Then the family stopped bothering.

"We don’t know that she had been referred to any services - it seems she was going to school and doing well (independent, playing basketball) before lockdown."

She wasn't independent. She was vulnerable and dependent on others for her care.

If a child with spina bifida and wheelchair dependent hadn't been referred to services, that in itself would indicate some gross negligence on someone's part, including both the health authorities and the council.

Why?
My son has severe autism and learning disabilities we currently have a socisl.worker ,because he has just been allocated over night respite ,he's been under the child disability team in the past and is waiting to be seen again for behavioural issues ,but we have gone long periods of time with no services involved ,ime,professionals don't stay involved just in case ,they are involved when there are.specific issues that need addressing and when these issues are resolved the child gets discharged from the services and only referred if needed .
assuming there had been no current concerns about her it's quite possible there were no.professional.s involved other than school.

I read in another articles yesterday that the mother had told the school during a welfare call that she was struggling to take care of kaylea and manage working her own job as a carer whether thst was referred on or not it does not say. I said during a school call during pandemic we were struggling (autistic child) and it just kind of got brushed off thst the pandemic was hard for everyone. We were no where near the levels of this family and did get through ok but I can see how the mothers comments could have been brushed off in same way

Sentenced today.Seven years and six years.

it's not enough !

There was no help or support during lockdown. Even previous sources of support such as school, clubs, respite or extended family were not available when most families needed it more than ever. Parents who previously held it together hit the wall. Even asking for help - what help? I could cry now thinking about it.

Obviously this is a horrific case, I'm not making excuses for the parents and I don't know details, but I feel the context of lockdown should not be underestimated.

@MammaYamada
you dont have to tell me. I have 2 children with extremely complex needs and my husband and I cared for them for a year day and night with no support at all.Not one single minute off.The whole pandemic was v hard for our family and many more like us who were forced to isolate completely for the duration . We didnt do anything special just cared for our children as best we could. So I get it I really do and I still say it wasnt a long enough sentence.

This annoys yes there was no support during lockdown but most parents of disabled children didn't resort to.neglecting their children to.the point of death i,m one of those parents ,this is on the.parents .

the term murder should be reserve for people who committed harm knowingly. That is a different level in harm.

If you want greater penalties for people who cause harm or death thru terrible negligence that's a different thing to campaign for.

I read that KT's mum was begging some people for help. She has always accepted responsibility. It doesn't help KT's siblings or any other vulnerable person for KT's parents to be vilified on social media (like MN). Her sibling's lives were torn apart, too. There's detail here about how the family functioned, and where they started slipping thru social safety nets in 2017.

I listened to the judges summing up yesterday lockdown was taken into account in the mitigating factors.

but if the mother really wanted to get help.all she needed to do was call an ambulance or ring the police. They would have taken one look and removed her from their care. Yes she would've been in trouble but not as much trouble as she now has on her hands.
I think dad was a different kettle of fish and couldnt give a toss . He just wanted to pass the blame to the mother.
Even more unbelievable is the fact that the mother was a carer for others whilst she let he own child of neglect at home. The girl was screaming for help and was ignored. There are no.mitigating circumstances extreme enough to offset that.

Nobody is saying the parents weren’t responsible for what happened or that they don’t the punishments.

but it does raise wider questions about support for disabled people and those who care for them. During lockdowns many where abandoned and since a lot of services still haven’t returned properly.

lessons have to be learnt to make sure nobody else is left to suffer in this way

There are no "lessons that can be learnt" that will stop wholly inadequate people having children then beating or neglecting them to death. If you need a service constantly on hand to ensure what happened to Kaylea doesn't happen then you shouldn't be left in charge of a goldfish let alone a vulnerable human being.

@Sirzy
I completely agree. The lack.of support for families with disabled members is a disgrace . l cant see anything being done to change it sadly.

To any of us the description of how this poor girl was found is extremely disturbing but was there maybe an element of boiling frog from the family's perspective who saw it all happen very gradually? Especially if they were also vulnerable and weren't the most skilled at pushing for help. I'm not justifying what they didn't do just trying to imagine how you would even get to that point.

With budget cuts and lack of support it seems like service providers have to start from a basis that any parent is capable of meeting the needs of any child however complex. Obviously this isn't the case and there must be a lot of lower level neglect and abuse going on that doesn't get picked up at all.

You read wrong. Per the court, Sarah Loyd Jones REFUSED or IGNORED all offers for help. The only person she asked for help was her husband and in her request she did not even mention that the help was for Kaylea. For all we know she couldn’t cope making dinner and thus the grand spent on takeaways.

Kaylea’s parents, especially her mum being a professional carer, knowingly neglected her to death by withholding essential care from Kaylea. Despite Kaylea begging them to do this care repeatedly, they mocked her or told her to shut up or swore at her.

Lockdown is not an excuse or a mitigation, i wish the death penalty existed for cases like these.
The parents will serve no useful purpose in life once released, you cannot be rehabilitated if you do this to another human being.

Absolutely. Lockdown was an opportunity for them to slowly kill their daughter by confining her to her bed in such a way she could not move, withholding essential care and responding to her begging for care to mock, swear or shout at her. No one who has read the court documents can even think that this was done “unknowingly” as an ‘ooops’. This was callous, calculated and unspeakably cruel. They even closed her blinds and curtains, Kaylea didn’t see a single ray of sunshine, or a bird fly by her window for six months as she was slowly killed in her bed.

Theres another thread on this. I thought I read she did not accept responsbility. She pleaded guilty yes but deflected blame everywhere, including on her daughter apparently.

I agree with you, I think the parents must be sociopathic and/ or extremely personality disordered, incapable of forming normal bonds with humans.
I agree that these people cannot be rehabilitated, and should never be trusted but at the same time I do not agree with the death penalty. I don't know what the answer is, it's a huge problem, what should we do with people who behave like this how can we stop people from becoming people behave like this ☹️

I'm not saying this to excuse them in any way but how did those parents become people who could treat someone like that?

How did these thick-as-pigshit scumbags afford 5 takeaways a week??
What happened to that poor girl is just too awful for words.