Cruel stepmother and father are jailed for Arthur’s killing
‘A “wicked” stepmother has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 29 years for cruelly abusing, poisoning and murdering her six-year-old stepson.
Arthur Labinjo-hughes was left with an unsurvivable brain injury while in the sole care of “evil” 32-year-old Emma Tustin.
She fatally assaulted him with severe force in the hallway of her Cranmore Road home in Solihull, on June 16, 2020, with Arthur dying in hospital the following day.
Tustin was unanimously convicted of Arthur’s murder after an eight-week trial, with the boy’s “pitiless” father, Thomas Hughes, 29, found guilty of his manslaughter, after encouraging the killing.
He was jailed for 21 years during their sentencing hearing at Coventry Crown Court yesterday.
It emerged at trial that Arthur had been seen by social workers just two months before his death, after concerns were raised by his paternal grandmother Joanne Hughes, but they concluded there were “no safeguarding concerns”.
In her victim impact statement, which she read in court ahead of the sentencing, Ms Hughes said Arthur, as a “happy, contented,
thriving seven-year-old”, would “be alive today” had her son not met Tustin.
The secondary schoolteacher added: “It is also clear Arthur was failed by the authorities that we, as a society, are led to believe are there to ensure the safety of everyone.”
As the hearing began, Mr Justice Mark Wall QC said Tustin had been brought to court for her sentencing but had “refused to come up” to the dock.
He started by saying the trial had been “without doubt one of the most distressing and disturbing cases I have had to deal with”.
Jailing the pair, he said: “This cruel and inhuman treatment of Arthur was a deliberate decision by you to brush off his cries for help as naughtiness.”
Addressing Tustin, whom he said had made a “calculated” decision to kill, he said: “You are a manipulative woman who will tell any lie, and shift the blame on to anyone, to save your own skin.”
He added: “You wanted Thomas Hughes so he could provide for you and your own children, but did not want to be troubled by Arthur any longer.”
The judge called Hughes’ “encouragement” of his girlfriend’s actions “chilling”.
He added: “You were Arthur’s father, in a position of trust, and bore primary responsibility for protecting him.
“He was extremely vulnerable and you lied to his school in the last days of Arthur’s life to protect both you and Ms Tustin.”