Three children found dead

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m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-27122410

Very, very sad

if someone takes the life of a [disabled] child(ren) in a family then I would be asking whether it was that one person decision alone, did the other family members get a chance to say goodbye (which in all likelihood they may well get chance to do so properly if child dies naturally eg child in hospice etc) - yes I can understand why she might have done it but I cannot comprehend it and don't think I would do it personally. had my ex killed or maimed my son no I would not have forgiven him. the lady I knew whose ex killed her son - no I don't think she can forgive....

the key issue for me here that puts the mother in a bad light is if she did this knowing the children's father and sibling would get no chance to say goodbye. and also the impact on the other sibling of now facing losing her mother if she convicted. and knowing what the mother did....whereas a natural death hopefully properly managed and supported by hospice pre bereavement counselling etcetcetc...surely that would be a better way to manage a terrible situation for the whole family?

having said that I can only assume that the mother was in desperation/throes of a mh crisis to do this.... and that would be mitigating circumstances.

the issue of nanny maid etc is relevant because she wasn't someone struggling to get SS to pay for childcare help and support. she probably didn't go thru getting a dfg grant to do up the house with lift etc to manage the disabilities.

that doesn't make the situation less difficult emotionally. but practically speaking, money can help a lot.

and I reiterate - you cant force counselling/emotional support /MH support on an adult unless they ask for it or unless they seen to be a threat to their own life or others' life. you cant always see it coming.

It's possible that she acted when her DH was away in order to protect him (from a legal point of view).
I remember watching the TV series about disabled children. One little girl was very seriously disabled and sometimes came close to dying. The doctor tried to persuade her mother that she should not be treated next time she had an attack, but should be allowed to die, and told her that that was the decision that he would make if it were his child. Continuing living, in painful and hopeless circumstances, is not always the best option, and forcing this on a child that has no power to escape from their situation (as an adult might have) seems to me to be very cruel.

'and I reiterate - you cant force counselling/emotional support /MH support on an adult unless they ask for it or unless they seen to be a threat to their own life or others' life. you cant always see it coming.'

Very true.

Far better to invest energy into creating a society where MH is not seen as the bogeyman, where people are not afraid to ask for help. Where competition for services does not mean help takes so long to come.

Locally, CAMHs refused to see my suicidal 14 year old son as he had not actually self harmed and that is their criteria; we need to see MH as deserving, not something to be ashamed of and deserving of help before we can really change anything.

protect the h legally - but not allow him/give him the option to be there when his own children died - given they both knew they would die. that is very cruel I think.

I was privileged to be at hosp with another friend when her baby died...I cant imagine her or her husband being denied that right to be there holding their child when she died. to be there at the birth, to be there at the death. it's very significant for a father too.

If both parents went to prison, what would happen to the surviving daughter?

No judgement from me, it's very sad and very clear that the family didn't get the support they needed, that could be due to no perceived need or the many cutbacks.
I can't imagine how that family coped.
How do you ever begin to cope with the certainty that your three children will only ever get worse and eventually die.
I have three children who have autism, I was expected to cope without support, especially when I was nursing my terminally ill DH for three years.
It took my involvement with an MP and a complaint made about social services, for us to get any type of support.
Social services have a policy that says that no one foster/respite family (that has two parents) can be expected to managed the needs of more than two children who have disabilities.
So why is it then seen as ok for the parents to manage in this situation?
The ultimate wrong doing here lies with the support services-that weren't.

we don't know what support services were or weren't offered.

we do know they had access to child care etc.
we do know they had the finances or got funds to adapt their house

emotional/psychiatric support will only be offered/taken up if the adult requests it/tells someone they plan to kill their children.

my ex had same level of respite support etc for my son that I did we were living together.

he wanted to do away with my son - I did not...

the difference is the MH of my ex at the time.

not the level of support

while he had expressed that he didn't want a disabled child to a psychiatrist already, no one could foresee he would actually attack my son.

Hi all,

I just wanted to join in with my perspective, as someone who has Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

First off I deeply sympathise with shakin and all the many parents who have lost their infants to SMA Type 1. It's deeply upsetting.

Secondly I thought it was important for me to write this as there has been a ton of misinformation and outdated facts in the press about SMA which hasn't helped matters in this case.

I was born with Type 2 SMA, which I believe is the same as the children who were killed and very different from the widely reported Type 1 cases. From the sounds of it they were weaker than I was at that age but - and this is a big but - the type of SMA they had did not mean they were moments away from death. Most people with SMA Type 2 are not in pain, they're not 'suffering'. If we catch chest infections then this can be very dangerous but SMA Type 2 is fortunately not a life sentence. I've known others with Type 2 who need help with breathing and eating but they live happy and fulfilling lives. We are not slowly dying.

I'm 26. I've been through mainstream education, two university degrees, I've worked in a 'normal' job. I am not a special case or a miracle. There are hundreds of us Type 2 adults living and working, having fairly ordinary lives. I can only speak from my own experience and say that I am a very happy person.

Having three children with SMA would be an enormous strain and it's upsetting that their family did not get the help and support and care they needed. Families with disabled kids rarely do. This is what needs to change. Funding. Emotional support. I believe this family were fortunate to be able to afford more adaptations and care than some families but hopefully this will expose the bigger issues when it comes to the long term support of families with disabilities. I have real sympathy for the whole family and this story has affected me strongly.

No we don't C'est but I do know from my own experience that being seen to have money or an education can be used by SSD as an excuse not to help, we get no respite or provision whatsoever and our alst carers assessment used my relevant - to - disability post grad as the reason no help was needed. It was and is, badly. I had a breakdown a few years ago and GP begged for help but none was forthcoming. I have given up on SSD now in entirety.

I cannot speak for this family, but I did work in a related field of family support and I know that the families we had who were perhaps of a higher social economic status or community standing often found it harder to ask for help as they felt they would be letting people down, risking their standing or even dismissed as not being in need due to finances or the nice house must be OK factor. Yes a night Nanny is useful if needed or whatever but even that's not simple- ds1's violence for example is so bad that we were told that if any harm came to an employee we hired (we were better off then) we would be liable as we knew the risks.

I can;t condone what she did, I don't know her individual circs either, but I do know that money can only buy so much. I imagine you'd probably be better off being poorer but with a close family (geographically and emotionally), for example (as someone who knows what moving away from that family added to stress). I also know there is a complete lack of services geared for those of us with multiple disabled kids. personally i think we actually scare the services away as we are not so much £ as ££££. It would take the entire local respite centre to give us a single night off; or they can help three other families with the one needy child.

I also know that some people are simply weaker and break more easily. I am strong, I presume you are too C'est, but DH had a lot of MH issues initially coming to terms with the ASD. I have a lot of theories about that (his parents saw SN as the end of the world, he was never exposed to disability in his life before the boys whereas I went to one of the first schools with a mixed SN / MS intake).

I cannot justify what your ex did and I have no wish to, it is never OK to harm any child, the disability is irrelevant to that really. But when such a tragedy as this happens we can seek to understand, and learn from it to stop it happening again. That has to count for something. Not to you- that would be a ridiculous ask- but to society as a whole.

emtee88, I was just about to post a very similar post, as I have a friend in their 40's with type 2.

It is sad that the media have confused the types.

indeed peachy.
society as a whole.

and to go back to my earlier point - society has to struggle with on the one hand allowing for parents to decide prenatally not to give birth to disabled children (and yes I know of parents given that option at week 39+) ;

while also accepting that some will decide to keep that child, and many others will unexpectedly end up with a disabled child and therefore there needs to be more openness about emotional support and more general acceptance of difference by society as a whole.

but I don't believe you can totally eradicate infanticide ....for whatever reason. you cannot always plan for or know

...and it would be wrong to demonise all parents of disabled children as having the potential to kill their own children because of their disability. should it be on automatic checklist? I don't think so...

it's very tricky and complex. multiple children in a family with disabilities? yes of course even more support...but again it would take an awfully sensitive gp/hv/sw to broach and see the issues which may be simmering and to deal with them before a tragedy happens.

you cant always see it coming...I did not foresee waking up on that day to my ex attacking my son....I don't think it's so terribly common as to need to be on everyone's plan.

emtee88 tks for your perspective. I think those children did have the chance of happy and fulfilled life up to whatever age it was going to be.

We know very little, cest. We don't know the medical details for these specific children. We don't know why they were killed - there are a number of possible reasons.

The thing that is difficult to grasp till you have been through it is the degree of responsibility having a child with a complex medical disorder brings, especially with a disorder that is degenerative.

Almost always one parent gives up work, and that parent becomes the "expert". They attend all the medical appointments, they read everything they can find on the condition. They live and breathe their child's illness; it becomes their "job". It's not always a full-time job, and yes you can pay for help (and sometimes receive pitiful amounts of support from the government) but however wonderful the help is, they're just another pair of hands: you are the one who decides what they need to do. The buck always stops with you. You can't hold down a paid job because at any moment the phone may ring and it is school saying your child is in an ambulance on the way to hospital again and you grab the hospital-stay bag that is packed by the door and head out after them, because the doctors are about to take life-or-death decisions and only you have several thick volumes of medical notes -drug interactions, complications, setbacks, what worked, what failed - memorised in your head. Even the doctors defer to you in the end so the really tough decisions become your decisions alone. And because you have no other job, there is nothing to take your mind off it. No successes, no celebrations, no colleagues, no turning the blackberry off when you're on holiday. It's like living in an office you can never leave.

Even the hospice can't give you respite from that. And when there's a setback the guilt hits. When your child can't walk any more, when they are in pain, when they have surgery that you opted for on their behalf, when the surgery doesn't work, when they have complications, when they can't even tell you what's wrong, you know that some of those decisions will have been wrong decisions and your child's suffering is your fault.

r3 that's a brilliant post, so beautifully put. Yes, that is the true state of the isolation.

r3 - your child's suffering is not your fault. you clearly doing everything you possibly can and more. you are not responsible for your genes or your child's genes.

felling the guilt - this is where support is needed. someone should be telling you every day - you are doing the best you can. it is not your fault.

Poor Father and Husband, how horrible to go through what he is without the added trauma of the press clambering to pull his personal life apart.

such a moving post r3
please tell yourself you are doing a good job and making the best decisions you can, at the time, with the info available to you, and sometimes under great pressures of time and stress. no one judges you for trying your utmost to do the best for DC

very wise words r3

Thankyou.

Actually, I'm very lucky in that DH is hugely supportive and always telling me what a good job I am doing. And there have been a couple of very clear decision points where the doctors were wrong and I was right and DD1 is only still with us because we argued our case: when it gets tough I remember that. But it is an enormous amount of pressure and I wouldn't be surprised if there are higher rates of MH problems in parents in this situation. Tbh I don't think this was the act of a mother in her right mind.

R3, that expresses it so welll. I've never had the end stages, thank God, but ten years of the rest.

And you are the only one who knows both your individual child and their condition. If it is rare, you explain it everytime there is a new face. You have to be in charge even in hospital, not only for the big decisions, but the small ones. That's prob true for non rare too.

You become, or I did, a hollow shell though I did have work as well, thanks to a public sector employer that was enormously generous in its ways of working. But yup, bags packed, never without the emergency medication and treatment, , sets if instructions to hand over, only going places where I had trained the responsible adult.

It's very common. But the exhaustion is overwhelming, one operates in very fragile micro climate. And at times I was not balanced.

Very moving posts from emtee and r3dh

The surviving daughter seems to be forgotten here.... A young girl,her life will never be the same. Her mother is up at the old bailey for murder... Her siblings gone. Awful for her. I feel for her. She's lost her mum too

i don't think she has been forgotten has she?
certainly my post expressing sympathy for all of them included her. plus my references to the effect of DS2s issues upon DS1.

Thank you for sharing that R3. You sound like a wonderful parent.