Birmingham mother left children home alone to fly to Australia

[misty]

Birmingham mother left children home alone to fly to Australia

BBC News
28 November 2014


"The mother, in Australia, ignored messages from the police, refusing to return for six weeks", reports Giles Latcham

A mother-of-six who flew to Australia for six weeks after telling her son she was going to the supermarket has been given a suspended jail sentence.

The Birmingham woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, left her 14-year-old son in charge when she went to stay with a boyfriend on 2 January.

The teenager called his grandparents, who alerted authorities.

She pleaded guilty to six counts of wilful abandonment at Birmingham Crown Court.
'Refused to fly home'

Sentencing her to a six month prison sentence, suspended for two years, Judge Murray Creed said it was "plainly a serious matter".

The court heard the woman's flight was paid for by a man she met online.

On the day of her disappearance the woman, who is now pregnant with her seventh child, left the house at 17:00 GMT. Her son called his grandparents, who do not live in Birmingham, four hours later. They alerted police and social services, who arrived at the house at 01:00 the following day.

The youngest of the children left at home was three years old.

The mother, a single parent, ignored messages from her parents and the police, deactivated her social media accounts and refused to fly home until her scheduled return six weeks later, the court heard.

She was arrested when she got back in February.
'Unaffected by experience'

The children are now living with their grandparents.

John Smitheman, defending the woman, told the court they were thriving academically and unaffected by the experience.

He said the woman had been a good mother but had been in an abusive relationship.

He said the stress of bringing the children up alone had led to a "very unusual, almost unique circumstance".

The court was shown cards made by her children saying they were missing their mother.

Judge Creed said the children had been brought up in "a satisfactory and supportive way throughout their lives so far".

"You've cared for them against a difficult background", he said.

"You didn't appreciate you'd done anything wrong and were not prepared to return

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-30246905

[ferryman]

And in other news:

A notorious paedophile nabbed after giving a DNA test when he was caught shoplifting has been jailed for 15 years. John Wood, 59, is this weekend starting his jail term for "monstrous" sex attacks committed 13 years ago on two young sisters.

Rape

Wood, of Chaddesden, near Derby, was finally brought to justice after giving a DNA sample when he was caught shoplifting toothpaste, batteries, and a jar of pasta sauce in Derby amounting to £10.26.

His DNA matched that left at the scene of the attack on the girls in September 1998.

Faced with the evidence, he pleaded guilty to raping and indecently assaulting an 11-year-old girl and to gross indecency and indecently assaulting her nine-year-old sister in Canterbury, Kent.

Knife

Judge Anthony Balston of Maidstone Crown Court, Kent, considered a life sentence but, owing to Wood's age, he said 15 years was sufficient.

Wood had sneaked into the girls' home and threatened to use a knife on them if they screamed. Their mother had gone out to work on a nightshift for the first time that evening.

'Never recover'

He subjected the two girls to an horrific hour-long ordeal. In sentencing, Judge Balston said Wood had terrified his two young victims in the sickening assault. "This was a brutal attack in which you used the knife, or the threat of one, to impose yourself on these unfortunate children," he said.

"It must have been clear to you at the time that they would suffer for what you did."

The girls' mother, who cannot be named, said her daughters would never get over the horrendous ordeal that Wood had put them through. "I don't know how we've coped as a family and how we got through it but we felt he would never be caught," she said.

"Obviously him being arrested and this case has brought everything back. His sentence today will not bring back their childhood and more than anything as a mother I would want to give them back their childhood. We wanted to be here today to draw a line under the incident in some way."

'Vile, monstrous'

Detective Chief Inspector Brian Roberts who led the investigation said: "The offences John Wood has been convicted of today are by far the most serious sexual offences I have ever encountered."

"They were inflicted upon two very young and innocent children. His behaviour that night in September 1988 was despicable, vile, cowardly and monstrous. For almost 13 years he believed he'd got away with it."

On his release, Wood will be supervised for 10 years and placed on the sexual offenders register for the rest of his life.

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Aside from the horrendous ordeal of those poor girls, the other point of note is that I can't find anything to indicate censure of the mother for leaving her children in bed alone while she worked a night-shift ...

http://news.sky.com/story/40002/dna-catches-paedophile-13-years-on