The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Family claims justice as man jailed for crushing boy to death with car seat
COURT: Alfie, 3, was squashed in car footwell
The family of three-year-old Alfie Lamb said “justice has prevailed” after an ex-minister’s son was jailed for crushing him to death with a car seat.
Stephen Waterson, 26, reversed the seat of his Audi convertible, squashing his girlfriend’s son in the footwell on February 1 last year.
He then orchestrated a “campaign of lies” to avoid responsibility for Alfie’s death.
Yesterday, Mr Justice Kerr sentenced Waterson to seven-and-a-half years for manslaughter, plotting to pervert the course of justice and intimidating witness Marcus Lamb.
The judge accepted character references from the defendant’s father, the former minister Nigel Waterson and his wife Barbara, but added that Waterson had been “cunning, manipulative, dishonest, disloyal, deceitful, threatening, controlling and sometimes violent”.
On the cover-up, Mr Justice Kerr told Waterson: “When the conspiracy began to falter in the second half of February 2018 under pressure from a very brave young woman, Ms Ashleigh Jeffery, you resorted to threats of violence, saying you could make people disappear.”
In her victim impact statement, Ms Jeffery said Waterson’s guilty plea was “like a huge weight had been lifted”.
She added: “He could have avoided so much more upset in people’s lives had he just owned up in the beginning.”
Detective Chief Inspector Simon Harding described Waterson as a “very arrogant, selfish, controlling and manipulative man”.
He said: “He knew what happened. “He tried to put my officers off the scent from the word go.”
He paid tribute to Ms Jeffery, saying she had been “incredibly strong and brave” in her determination to find out what happened and “changed the course of the investigation”.
It is the first time anyone in the UK has died from crush asphyxiation as a result of an electronic car seat, police said.
Waterson and Hoare had gone shopping for cushions in Sutton, south London, accompanied by Alfie, Williams, Marcus Lamb, 22, and another young child.
Nightclub worker Waterson wanted to stretch his legs out and twice moved his front passenger seat into Alfie as he sat at his mother’s feet, jurors heard.
By the time they arrived at Waterson’s home in Croydon, the little boy had collapsed and he died from crush asphyxia three days later.
In mitigation for Waterson, Tana Adkin QC told the court: “While thoughtless, I have no doubt, and selfish in his behaviour on February 1, he was not deliberately malevolent and nasty towards Alfie.”
Waterson’s father Nigel Waterson was first elected MP for Eastbourne in 1992 and was a junior minister in John Major’s government, but was defeated by Liberal Democrat Stephen Lloyd at the 2010 general election.