Mother let two-year-old die of thirst - seven and a half years imprisonment

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Defendant in the process (archive picture): Seven and a half years imprisonment for manslaughter by omission

After the painful death of a two-year-old in Grevenbroich, the Mönchengladbach regional court sentenced the mother to seven and a half years in prison.

The court found the 28-year-old guilty of attempted manslaughter and bodily harm resulting in death, both by failure to do so. The woman had therefore deliberately left the child lying unsupervised in an overheated room in her apartment in North Rhine-Westphalia for two days. It died of thirst.

According to the court's ruling, the mother of two children packed the boy in a sleeping bag and placed him in the cot on the evening of April 14, 2019. Because the heating in the apartment had failed, she turned a fan heater on full and put it in front of the bed. Only in the morning of the day after next did she go back into the room to check on her son. She "simply let him down," said the judge.

Mother says she was overwhelmed with the situation

With the judgment, the court followed the prosecution's request. Since the exact time of death could not be determined in the process, the defendant could not be proven to kill, it said. The mother was therefore only convicted of attempted manslaughter by omission.

The 28-year-old had previously confessed to the crime and testified that she had cancer and was overwhelmed with the situation. But she "never thought that the child could die," said the woman in the process.

fek / dpa