Laura Heath, a drug addict mother has been found guilty of manslaughter.
Gatekeepers News reports that Heath was found guilty of the gross negligence manslaughter of her asthma-suffering seven-year-old son after the boy died alone and ‘gasping for air’ in a garden.
This boy’s demise was just two days after social services had voted to act to protect him but decided to ‘wait until after the weekend’.
Prosecutors had told Coventry Crown Court that 40-year-old deliberately “prioritised her addiction to heroin and crack cocaine” prior to the “needless, premature” death of ‘frail’ Hakeem Hussain from an asthma attack on Sunday November 26 2017.
During the trial, an image revealed how Heath had even used foil and an elastic band to rig one of her son’s blue inhalers to smoke crack, fuelling a £55-a-day habit.
Heath, before been convicted of gross negligence manslaughter of Hakeem, admitted four counts of child cruelty before trial, including failing to provide proper medical supervision and exposing him to class A drugs.
The boy’s death came just months before Birmingham Children’s Trust took over child social services in early 2018, with responsibility transferred from the council’s failing child social services department after years of poor performance dating back to 2008.
Those failures were placed in sharp focus by high-profile child deaths, such as those of Khyra Ishaq in 2008, Keanu Williams in 2011, and Keegan Downer in 2015.
Social services in Birmingham were aware of Hakeem before his death, and it emerged at trial how at a child protection conference on Friday November 24, 2017 – just two days before his fatal collapse – a school nurse, Melanie Richards told the meeting “he could die at the weekend from asthma.”
However, the meeting ended with an agreement that the family’s social worker would speak to Heath on the Monday, detailing the meeting’s outcome – by which time Hakeem was dead.
School nurse Melanie Richards, while giving her evidence at the trial, said she told the meeting “he (Hakeem) could die at the weekend from asthma.” She scored Hakeem’s safety as ‘zero’ out of 10.
Although Hakeem was not the only child of Heath, his three half-siblings have all been removed from her care.
Iain Butlin Moran, the chair of the conference, told the trial that social worker Stuart Sanders had been due to speak to Heath about the meeting’s outcome, and to urge her to “work with social services”, but he added that “standard practice would have been to do that on the Monday.”
Neelam Ahmed, family outreach worker at Hakeem’s school, also told jurors how she had also voted at that meeting “to take Hakeem immediately in to care.”
After today’s verdict, The Children’s Commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, said, “Another devastating case. For Hakeem and the other children who have needlessly lost their lives, saying it won’t happen again isn’t enough. We must not tolerate the same platitudes, we need actions that deliver so that it can’t.
“This case raises further questions about the safety of children in Birmingham. I will be raising my concerns with the Department for Education and Birmingham Children’s Services Trust directly.”
