Abused toddler found dead in his father's fridge

Once again, a toddler has been found dead (German link) in its own home, a victim of abuse and neglect, this time in Bremen. Two-year-old Kevin was repeatedly treated in a child-care institution for various injuries resulting from physical abuse. When his mother died (under unclear circumstances) in November 2005 the head of the institution stated that he could not assume the responsibility of Kevin returning to his drug-addict father.

The case social worker had decided to return Kevin to his father at the latter's insistence, provided that "accompanying measures" were taken. Doctors on the case had provided a "positive prognosis".
Kevin was last seen alive in July. In September, the Youth Welfare Office decided to remove him to a foster home, the court passed its verdict on 2 October.

Employees of Social Services found his body in the refrigerator when they came to pick him up earlier this week - accompanied by the police as his father had not reacted to court summons to arrange an appointment. When asked about Kevin's whereabouts, his father pointed to the fridge and said, "Over there".
Kevin's body was covered with injuries such as multiple broken bones and bruises to his head.
The Secretary for Social Services, Karin Röpke, immediately took the responsibilty for the catastrophic mis-management of the case and resigned. The mayor, who is on the board of the child-care institution where Kevin had been cared for, had spoken to her about Kevin's case early this year after being alarmed by two employees there who claimed that Kevin's parents were unable to care for him and obviously abused him.

Dammit, why does a child have to suffer and die until these idiots react? Why can anybody beget, bear and raise children while proper job training takes at least two years? What about neighbors? When a child gets hit it tends to scream - don't they hear, or do they just not want to hear?

The thought of what this baby went through makes me sick.

I don't support the death penalty. But cases like that make it very hard not to. Abusing and murdering one's own child is something I just can't understand.

In those cases, I am for putting the parents in jail for a very, very long time... Unfortunately, it never happens... Same thing with rape by the way...

what a sickeningly sad story, which as you rightly say, could probably have been prevented.
I hope they correctly and fairly punish his father, not that he gets away with it for 'diminished responsibility' or some such crap.

I hope he dies in prison of an infected shared needle without benefit of painkillers. But the other prisoners will be after him as well.

It's sad. It's horribly, terribly, gut-wrenchingly sad. It fucking makes me sick. Parents like that should be shot. As for the people who knew or suspected it was happening... I wouldn't want to live with the guilt they must feel.

Can't think of any words to describe this avoidable tragedy, the father has to be punished obviously but don't let a good bout of blood letting get in the way of ensuring that the system involved in allowing this to happen is where the emphasis is placed to prevent a re-occurence of this monstrous act !!!

There is an investigation going on and I'm sure some official heads will roll - right on to a sideways shunted cushy job with a tax-funded pension.

I don't understand why, in cases like these, the parent wants the child to continue living with him/her.

This isn't the only case where a parent who later abuses and/or kills a child, got custody in the first place because they insisted they wanted the child to live with them.

Surely it's not down to Kindergeld or Erziehungsgeld that they otherwise wouldn't get.

Having worked around drug users, some of whom neglected their kids, I would note that the role of the social services and medical services is not an easy one and though mistakes may have been made I would not be overly hard on them. Drugs are a persistent menace and the sooner we actually get a sensible way to deal with them stories like this will continue to surface. But the fact remains that drug addiction and for that matter, alcoholism, does not in and of itself make one an unfit parent and most authorities err on the side of keeping kids with birth parents without strong good reasons to remove them.

Personally I do not think that drugs/alcohol and parenting mix at all and would possibly support moves to see addiction/alcoholism as grounds for removing children from birth parents.

Ive worked in this area. The problem is a lot of people who abuse their children dont really think of them as humans more so as possesions. They want them simply because they are theirs. The way one would own a dog or a trash can.

But the neighbors would report abusing a dog (or even a trash-can for that matter) more quickly than a helpless child.

Statement 1:

Statement 2: (happily subsequent to statement 1)

Good show

Ah, but statement #2 starts with "personally". Statement #1 is general.

uh i thought a fact is a fact regardless of circumstance...forgive me for this mild interjection of logic

in any case carrry on

quite

That poor little boy

And now a mother who was known to have alcohol problems and was in treatment and had a steady job and a steady relationship has stabbed her two-year-old (German link) right here in Munich. She had the massive blood alcohol content of 0.4%!!! The social services (German link) knew of her problems, she spoke to them regularly, they got the kid into a kindergarten etc.
The boy, Kevin (an unlucky name if there ever was one!), was operated and is in a stable condition.

Is Kevin a common German name...think not?

Life imprisonment (which in the UK is not life... ) with sterilization, so if they do ever get released, they have no chance of being able to do the same ever again.

This mom murdered her twins and kept them in the freezer, even taking them with her when she moved house. There are a lot of screwed-up people in the world.

I have had a discussion on a similar topic before and I feel they should be given the death penalty!

It's just weird how often these things happen over here. If it's poverty, my goodness, there are so many other countries in the world where the people are much poorer, have no social system helping them and still on average find a way to survive with their families. To me this seems to happen more often here. I hardly ever read of such cases in other international newspapers. It could be though that the media in other countries do not report these things that often. Germany is one of the richest countries in the world and with the Babyklappe and all, I don't understand why so many people kill their kids if they don't want them. I also don't understand how people can abuse their kids to such an extent and not have the neighbours notice anything.

Definitely not common but I know of two, both toddlers. I think it might be becoming modisch to adopt Anglified names.

bit off-topic: "Kevin" as a first name was very common and in vogue cause of the movie "home alone" (german title: Kevin allein zu Haus), maybe also Kevin Costners Dancing with Wolves gave some inspiration.
Parents who name their kid "Kevin" do not have a very good reputation here. lack of education or just bad taste ...

maybe hollow man! parents of kevins are therefore regarded as a bit hollow

the German Kevin-wave was early 90s, most of those kevins are about 15 yrs old by now.

When I was a kid(a long, long time ago when the dinosaurs still ruled this planet), people were calling their kids Heidi or Maja on account of the TV cartoons for kids. Just as thick. Although, I might add, nobody then killed their kids and put them in freezers.

walking through town this afernoon, the Bild headlines caught my eye, there's a photo of little Kevin smiling. makes me feel really sad to look at it. what an awful terrible 2 years he must have lived.
Bild

I certainly don't know how the German system is, but working with and having 2 social worker sisters, in the U.S. the system makes it almost imposible to properly manage cases.

Social workers are so underpaid and the case load is absurb. It is a set up for failure.

People yell if social work gets involved when it is "not warrented" or "overreacting" in their eyes, and also when these kinds of horrid events happen.

If a society wants to protect the children then they have to fund the programs properly.

I for one think drugs and alcoholism absolutely DO NOT MIX with parenting and a safe and supportive home. I have no sympathy for actively using/abusing parents. Those kids should be removed and only returned if the parents do weekly testing and mandatory counseling. Too many times the kids pay the price in physical/sexual and emotional abuse because "the parents have rights".

Sure parents have rights, but only up until you cross the line, then as far as I am concerned you lose your rights.

I am happy to say that Haggis junior's class (10th grade) is having mandatory Childcare lessons in the second semester, right before graduation. I can only hope that this catches on in other schools and will ultimately lead to better parenting.

Absolutely! The parent has to pick one or the other.
take care,
space

I also don't understand how people can abuse their kids to such an extent and not have the neighbours notice anything.
[/quote]

Because people do not TALK to each other! I`ve lived in my flat for about one year and the neighbours look uncomfortable saying good morning. It`s not just me either - I see people walking past each other without saying anything!

About the death penalty. Please no! Give it a couple of years and people will be hanged here for wearing mismatching socks.

@ cakeeater: In this case, there was no prior abuse. The mother freaked out at 0.4% (my mind still f***ing boggles at that and I am a well-known weekend imbiber!) and stabbed the kid. The mother and her patchwork family had been under constant social care since the beginning of the pregnancy (she was about 43 at the time, very late even for a third pregnancy), the communal nurse visited her for 10 hours every week after Kevin was born, the boy had been in a creche ever since he was 7 months old. The creche employees had noted that she had been drinking more heavily in the last few months but she was able to keep her part-time job, and Kevin never showed any signs of abuse or maltreatment.
How far does official surveillance have to go? The mother snapped and Kevin is now due for a foster home. End of story. Not a happy ending, but at least he is still alive and may or may not ever know how he got the scar on his chest.

if social services had removed Kevin to an accessible foster home for a trial period until the mother dried out then maybe this would not have happened and child and mother would not have been separated.

We sit around then and let it happen again.Which it will, and social services will say according to their rulings there was no proof that something like this could happen.The neighbours will say that they had no idea.The latest case is that a poor child was starved to death.Read about it on Friday.Things with children are happening too much in modern society and the perpetuaters are only getting a slap on the wrist.Terrible crimes call for drastic actions.
A child cannot defend itself.How many abusers get let out cured and do it again?I know of two cases in the last year.One being in the Münich area.All reported in the press here.
Put another way, what would you want if your child was abused?
And to be honest cases of child abuse have soared in Germany since the wall came down.
This is an increasing delikt in Germany and has to be stopped NOW.

According to the preliminary autopsy report based on examining the condition of the bones, Kevin suffered an open fracture of the femur one to two weeks before dying and was dead when he was shoved into the fridge.
This untreated injury can have been fatal, due either to infection or to inner bleeding. Doctors called it "unlikely" that the injury was sustained in a fall. Further reports, however, are upcoming.

What is even more scary is the result of the vote that they have on the link.It would seem that Germans are becoming immune to the fact of child deaths and abusement.Feel free to tarnsalte the vote i am knackered.

There have been a number of cases in the UK over the last 3 or 4 years where unbeleivable cruelty has been visited upon children and the 'authorities' have been pilloried in hindsight.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think that the 'authorities' are staffed by normal people like us and so it's pretty hard for them to distinguish between the normal spectrum of dysfunctional familes an the kind of sinister and devious nutter who would put their dead kids in a freezer and move house.

In order for us to prevent this kind of thing happening we would need to staff our social services departments with devious psychopaths who could predict the behavour fo devious psychopaths.

Dafydd, I don't know if you have followed the extensive coverage of this case in the German papers, but it seems to have been a question of costs ... Leaving the kid with his dead mother's partner (he wasn't the biological father) was much cheaper than placing it in a home or foster family. The hospital where Kevin was treated - repeatedly - objected strongly to his returning home but was overruled by Social Services who said that district nurses and social workers were in constant contact with the family. But as they were understaffed all they could do was ask the foster father to get in touch with them and bring Kevin to their offices - no time to visit every single case Social Service was supposed to be working on.

So basically Sarabyrd they are now putting prices on childrens lifes.


Would you give a lighter to a firebug as a present???
The guy had a past record of violence hence the visits to the hospital.
Big mistakes were made here and the whole social services needs reviewing before it happens again

That's it in a nutshell.

If you cannot take second-hand suffering do not read this post. I started this thread never dreaming how horrible the truth is and would not feel right suppressing it now that it has been published. While studying criminal law I read gruesome autopsy reports and thought I was hardened but this had me crying right there in the S-Bahn.

The results of the autopsy on Kevin have been published - all 22 pages of it. Including attachments and complementary expertises the autopsy report is about an inch thick. For a two year old child. Kevin had been dead app. five months before he was found, meaning that he died in April/May 2006. Bones had been broken in 19 different regions, almost every bone in his body, some of them up to three times. The cranium front left and basis; both upper arms; right lower arm; left wrist; left femur; both fibia and tibia in either leg; four ribs. Contusions, strains caused by extreme rotation, compression of the rib-cage, blows to the head. No claim to completeness. In the 24 hours before his death Kevin suffered so many broken bones that he died of fat embolism,


According to the pathologist and DA there were 24 separate incidents leading to injuries, none of them consistent with accidents as the mother and foster father had claimed when Kevin was treated in 2004.
It seems that the doctor treating Kevin's foster father not only prescribed methadon but "various other medication" with the side-effect of making the guy highly aggressive, the doctor is due to be charged with offending against drug control laws - and with fraud as he invoiced the foster father's health insurance for having treated Kevin in July, two or three months after his death.
I do not feel any hatred towards the foster father; I am furiously, helplessly angry with the Social Services who knew of Kevin's injuries, could have saved him and did not protect him; and I am again in tears about what this baby must have suffered.

Poor Baby...

For someone who doesn't like/want kids, this is one of those that makes me say FOR GOD SAKE, If you don't want him, at least I'd treat him better... GIVE HIM TO ME.

*Sends thoughts and prayers out to Kevin who had been through so much that we can't even imagine.*

** Knows that the guy that did this will BURN IN HELL - and I could be the one to put him there without a second thought. **

~Rose

I do.

Second you on that J.L.

A case of displaced anger, I think Yes, the Social Services could have saved him, but as incompetent as they were, the parents caused this. This is one of the few times that I would even consider the death penalty and when I consider it under such circumstances it isn't all nice like with a lethal injection. These people should be fucking beat to death slowly and surely.

The guy who did it is a monster and belongs put away for life, of course. But the Social Service workers should be right there with him, they could have prevented Kevin's suffering and ultimate death if they had used common sense and listened to people directly involved with the family from the start instead of writing letters telling the guy to bring Kevin to their office.

Worse many people look away when they see a kid being spanked which is just bullying someone smaller than you. Hey we even have some people on these forums who think it (and worse) is cool. Either you tolerate/condone child abuse or you don't.

Parnell, it all depends what you mean by being spanked.I am a firm believer that a clip round the ear hole is not too bad.Some people however go overboard.As to child abuse i am NOT FOR IT AT ALL.The rise in child abuse in Germany in the last 4 years is worrying to say the least.