2023-09-28 18:35:25
The Hainaut Assize Court handed down a 21-year prison sentence on Thursday once morest Madissone Massy (29), guilty of murdering her 9-month-old son and beating the child. The events took place in July 2019 in Boussu and Dour.
The jurors retained mitigating circumstances in favor of the accused: her young age, her limited intellectual abilities, complicated family circumstances, Münchhausen syndrome, her depression following the death of her daughter in 2017.
On July 16, 2019, Madissone Massy was alone with her son in the family home in Wihéries (Dour). She calls her husband, who is at work, to inform him that their son Enzo, aged nine months, has become unwell. She calls her mother and then the emergency services, six minutes later.
Paramedics took the child to Epicura Hospital in Hornu for examinations. The mother refuses, but a doctor threatens to call the king’s prosecutor. She accepts on the condition of being able to stay with her son and her husband.
On July 18, 2019, her husband left to pick up clothes from their home. He’s not coming back. Anxious, Madissone Massy calls him several times, which annoys her husband, who is at his mother-in-law’s house. During the last call, it is the mother who answers. She forbids her daughter to call her husband once more, unless it concerns the child.
Alone with the child in the hospital room, Madissone Massy takes action. She presses on the chest of her son, whose body is covered with a blanket placed over the airways. The child turns red, he is asphyxiated.
The child is brain dead and is taken to Jolimont hospital urgently. He was pronounced dead on July 22.
The death was of unnatural cause, notes a doctor. An investigation is opened for assault and battery resulting in death without intention to cause it.
The expert reports, which concluded that death was caused by mechanical asphyxiation, changed the charge to murder.
On Thursday, jurors found that the crime was premeditated. On July 15, the mother did searches on the Internet with the keywords “baby suffocated” or “child suffocation”.
Until the trial opened, the accused maintained that her son had been the victim of a medical error. Monday, during the hearing, she admitted to having pressed, without feeling her strength, on the child’s chest. However, she disputed the intention of homicide. Suffering from Münchhausen syndrome, she used her son to bring her husband back to her.
In the weeks preceding the crime, Madissone Massy made numerous visits to the emergency rooms of hospitals in the Mons-Borinage region, even though her son was in excellent health. She feared that the child would suffer sudden death.
She believed that her daughter, who died at birth in October 2017, had suffered sudden infant death syndrome. In fact, the newborn had inhaled meconium fluid and choked.
Madissone Massy
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