Family Solicitors

A mother of two young children from Knowle on Merseyside has pleaded guilty to neglect, after she allowed her children to play at their grandparents’ home where the body of the children’s uncle was later found decomposing n an upstairs room.

The children have been taken into care after their mother was previously told not to take her children – aged four and five – to her parents' house by social services because of the squalid conditions there. The mother cannot be named for legal reasons.

The Daily Mail reports that the mother’s parents are compulsive hoarders and images of the house reveal rubbish heaped up in rooms, as well as thick grime and mould around the windows and kitchen cabinets.

However, when police and environmental officers were called to the house, they joked about a body being on the premises because of the smell – and later found the body of the mother’s brother in an upstairs bedroom, who had been dead for up to a month.

It is reported the woman’s parents were unaware that he had died.

Police and environmental health officials were called in by neighbours who saw that the windows were covered in dead insects, the court was told.

Officers discovered “an overwhelming smell” at the house – and saw a doorway surrounded by thousands of insects.

When officers found the corpse of the young mother’s brother, it is reported that her mother “gasped'” and “nearly fell down the stairs”.

The mother’s defence lawyer told the court:

“It's not possible to say when he died and certainly not possible to say how he died. His former girlfriend in Scotland said she last had contact with him a month before his body was found.”

The court heard that the woman regularly took her children round to see their grandparents – despite being advised not to do so by social services because of the state of the house.

The prosecution told the court:

“Every day she was going in and out of the property with her two boys. Social services had done their best to persuade the defendant that it was in her and her children's best interests not to be at the house.”

The mother pleaded guilty to neglect at Liverpool Crown Court and was sentenced to an 18-month community order.

Judge Stephen Everett told the children’s mother:

“Even without the tragic circumstance of your brother's death, the reality is that the house was not a place where young children should be. You lost all sense of responsibility to your children.

“We will never know in the days or weeks following your brother's death why nobody did anything – he lay there in that bedroom and the smell was indescribable.

“For any mother to bring their children in that circumstance defies belief.

“You failed to see something that everyone else could, except the three of you.

Judge Everett said that the only “silver lining” was that the mother’s two young sons were now “doing well” in the care of guardians.

Duncan Lewis Children Lawyers

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For expert legal advice on all child care matters, call Duncan Lewis children lawyers on 020 7923 4020.