A 39-year-old mother is currently facing Coventry Assize Court following the death of her son Hakeem, which judges have ruled preventable. These point to the catastrophic conditions in which the 7-year-old boy lived, who died of an asthma attack.
And for good reason, Hakeem’s inhaler was used by his mother to take drugs, which the court judges as “a sign of the mother’s great negligence”. The photos of the house in a pitiful state of the house were shown to the jury. We learn in particular that the 7-year-old boy slept in an armchair and that the cleanliness left much to be desired.
A friend of the mother explains: “It was not a house at all, neither for her nor for Hakeem. As soon as you walked in, the kitchen was disgusting, the hall wasn’t tidy, I didn’t know Laura might live in those conditions. »
The little boy’s teachers confirm that he had been neglected and often arrived with dirty hair and clothes that smelled of urine. Heath, 39, denies manslaughter but admitted four counts of child cruelty, including failing to provide adequate medical supervision for his son and exposing Hakeem to drugs of class A.
The little boy with asthma was absent several times before his death, and was hospitalized three times. During one of these admissions, he was in an acute life-threatening state related to his asthma.
The night of his death, he had gone to bed at 10:00 p.m. and had been joined by his mother, who had finished smoking heroin, an hour later. The little boy woke up during the night because he needed fresh air, because of his asthma. Usually, he woke up his mom when he wasn’t feeling well, but she didn’t come to help him on that occasion. His lifeless body was found in the garden the following day.
“Heroin and cocaine levels in Hakeem’s hair sample were elevated. The drugs, unfortunately, in this case, came before everything else, including Hakeem,” the prosecution said. The juries have not yet rendered their verdict and the trial continues.
