A mum who shockingly hid her baby in a drawer under her bed for three years has been jailed. The two-year-old was found just weeks shy of her third birthday at their Cheshire home, suffering from matted hair, deformities, and rashes, Chester Crown Court was told.
The court heard how the mother, whose name is withheld to protect her child’s identity, kept her daughter hidden from her other children in a divan bed drawer and even managed to conceal the truth from her partner who frequently stayed over. After pleading guilty to child cruelty, Honorary Recorder of Chester Judge Steven Everett condemned the woman’s actions, saying: “To my mind what you did totally defies belief. You starved that little girl of any love, any proper affection, any proper attention, any interaction with others, a proper diet, much-needed medical attention.”
He continued: “You attempted to control this situation as carefully as you could but by sheer chance your terrible secret was discovered. The consequences for (the child) were nothing short of catastrophic – physically, psychologically and socially.”
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(Image: CHESHIRE POLICE/UNPIXS)
He remarked on the resilience of the child, describing her as an “intelligent little girl who is now perhaps slowly coming to life from what was almost a living death in that room”. It emerged in court that the woman failed to seek help for the child’s cleft palate and neglected to provide sufficient food and water, resorting to feeding her milky Weetabix via a syringe, reports the Mirror.
Sion ap Mihangel, prosecuting, revealed to the court: “She was kept in a drawer in the bedroom, not taken outside, not socialised, no interaction with anybody else.”
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He described how the child had the developmental age of nought to 10 months upon first arriving at the hospital, suffering serious malnutrition and dehydration. Mr ap Mihangel told of how the infant was routinely left alone while her mum took her siblings to school, went to work, or stayed over with relatives during Christmas.
The prosecutor said that when the mother’s boyfriend started staying overnight, the child was shunted into another room on her own. The tot’s plight came to light after the mother’s partner heard a sound one morning and stumbled upon the child in one of the bedrooms after using the loo.
Shockingly, he left without taking the child but later alerted relatives and social services who eventually found her still in the bed drawer. A gobsmacked social worker stated: “She replied matter of factly ‘yes, in the drawer’,” recounting the mother’s indifferent reaction.
(Image: MEN Media)
“I was shocked the mother did not show any emotion and appeared blasé about the situation. It became an overwhelming horror that I was probably the only other face (the child) had seen apart from her mother’s.”
Two police officers were left in tears in the courtroom as they listened to a heart-wrenching statement from the child’s foster carer, which the judge called “truly devastating”. The carer revealed: “It became very apparent she did not know her own name when we called her.”
In a police interview, the mother claimed ignorance of her pregnancy and expressed being “really scared” upon giving birth.
She insisted that the baby wasn’t always kept in the drawer under the bed and that it was never shut, but admitted to officers that the child was “not part of the family”. She disclosed to social workers her abusive relationship with the child’s father and her desire to keep the baby hidden from him.
The woman admitted her guilt in October on four counts of child cruelty, which included failing to obtain necessary medical care for the youngster, abandonment, underfeeding and overall neglect.
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