‘Rotting man’ mother, gran and sister are sent to prison
THREE Leeds women who condemned their 18-year-old relative to “a lingering death” have been jailed.
Jordan Burling weighed less than six stones, was severely malnourished and dehydrated and covered in infected pressure sores when he was found lying on a dirty inflatable mattress at his family home in Butterbowl Garth, Farnley, in June 2016.
Yesterday his mother, Dawn Cranston, 45, was jailed for four years and his grandmother, Denise Cranston, 70, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment after they were both convicted of manslaughter at Leeds Crown Court.
His sister, Abigail Burling, 25, was then jailed for 18 months after being found guilty of causing or allowing the death of a vulnerable adult.
During the trial the court heard that Jordan’s health deteriorated rapidly between April and June in 2016 and he became emaciated, immobile and incontinent.
His mother and grandmother claimed they did not want Jordan to die and they cleaned him daily, changed his nappy and attended to his pressure sores, but he refused to see a doctor after a bad experience at a previous appointment.
But his pressure sores got so deep that his bone was exposed and they became infected. He also lost so much weight that his body drew on the fat in his bone marrow as a last-resort energy source.
A nursing expert told the court they were the worst pressure ulcers she had seen in 30 years of practice, while Jordan’s uncle, Michael Burling, said his dramatic weight loss left him “looking like a Jew kept in captivity by the Germans during the Second World War”.
Miss Cranston eventually phoned 999 on June 30, 2016, after she became concerned about noises her son was making, but minutes after paramedics arrived he went into cardiac arrest and died.
During a post-mortem examination, pathologists found the teenager had died as a result of bronchopneumonia, caused by malnutrition, immobility and infected pressure sores.
Police then searched the Cranstons’ home and found the decomposed remains of a baby boy inside a rucksack that had been stuffed into a wardrobe.
Dawn Cranston later admitted that she had given birth to the baby more than 10 years earlier and decided to put him into a rucksack when it became clear he was dead.
She ultimately pleaded guilty to endeavouring to conceal the birth of a child and was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. But this sentence will run concurrently with her sentence for manslaughter.
Mr Justice Spencer, sentencing, said: “It is profoundly disturbing and almost beyond belief that Jordan Burling – a young man of 18 – should have been allowed to die in his own home here in Leeds in 2016, in the bosom of his family, through the failure of all three of you to take elementary humane steps to summon medical assistance for him when it was obvious that for many days, if not weeks, he was quite literally at death’s door.
“Whatever view he may have expressed himself about not wanting to see a doctor, each of you independently could and should have summoned that help.
“With proper medical care in hospital his life could undoubtedly have been saved.
“Instead, he was condemned to a lingering death, emaciated, immobile and undoubtedly incontinent.
“No-one who has seen the photographs taken at post mortem will ever be able to forget those images. They are too horrific to be published.”