A 32-year-old drug dealer, Nathaniel Pope, has been found guilty of murdering his girlfriend’s son, Kemarni.
Gatekeepers News reports that the court was informed during the trial that Kemarni had 34 separate areas of external injuries.
On Tuesday, Pope was jailed for life at Birmingham Crown Court with a minimum of 24 years.
His girlfriend and Kemarni’s mother, 31-year-old Alicia Watson, was cleared of murder but was jailed for 11 years for child cruelty and causing or allowing the death of her three-year-old son.
According to a viral picture, remorseless Pope smiled with officers and claimed not to be Watson’s partner when police arrived at the scene of the picture.
A video clip of the encounter with an officer was released by West Midlands Police after the sentencing, showing a shirtless Pope in an apparently relaxed mood despite beating Kermani to death.
The Judge said she believed Pope was under the influence of cannabis when he killed the toddler. Kermarni was kept in a room locked with an electrical wire in a cramped property in West Bromwich, Birmingham.
He suffered ‘a catalogue of horrendous injuries’ – likened to those of a car crash victim – in the weeks before he was killed while living in the flat which had rooms strewn with rubbish and clothing.
Jurors heard that Watson and Pope, who blamed each other from the witness box, continued to live together for several months after Kemarni died from abdominal injuries in June 2018 when his ribs were ‘crushed’ at their two-bedroom flat in West Bromwich.
Passing the sentences, Justice Tipples said the three-year-old had suffered more than 25 rib fractures at four different points in time.
The judge told Pope and Watson: “This is a particularly distressing and tragic case. Kemarni died on the afternoon of the June 5 2018. You, Nathaniel Pope, brutally assaulted Kemarni in the sitting room of his own home, and knowing he was in extreme distress and pain, you left him to bleed to death.
“I am sure that you did this when Alicia Watson was out. When you (Watson) returned, you found Kemarni’s lifeless body on the sofa and dialled 999.”
The judge added that Kemarni’s injuries had been the result of extremely severe force ‘compatible with the type of injuries seen in a road traffic collision or when an individual falls from a height’.
Watson knew Pope was injuring Kemarni with punches and kicks and had done nothing to stop it, the judge said, while she also ‘regularly beat him hard’ with her hands.
The trial was told Kemarni had most likely been stamped on and had been subjected to physical abuse on several occasions in the weeks leading up to his death.
Watson lied to several people about her son’s injuries – telling his nursery and other family members that he’d been hurt in a play fight with his siblings.
On the day he died, she took Kemarni to a medical centre where she told medics her son was suffering from a suspected stomach bug.
