Alcoholic mother left boy, 4, to starve to death:
Child’s mummified remains in a travel cot, wearing a babygrow for a six to nine month old
LONDON – The images should haunt those who failed him until their dying day. One shows Hamzah Khan looking imploringly into the camera for help that never came; the other shows the unimaginable squalor of the house where his body lay mummified after his mother, Amanda Hutton, starved him to death.
A jury convicted Hutton, an alcoholic mother of eight, of manslaughter on Thursday.
The verdict answered the question posed at the start of her trial, when a prosecutor asked how it was possible for a child to starve to death in 21st century Britain.
Yet a far bigger question remains: why did a procession of doctors, police officers, teachers and social workers fail to save Hamzah, who was so malnourished that he ate the contents of his nappies? And how could a four-year-old boy, whose mother was seen regularly by the authorities, die in a busy suburb of Bradford without anyone noticing for almost two years?
One child protection charity said today that it was as if Hamzah had been “invisible” to all those who visited the home.
His death might have remained undetected had it not been for the “mother’s instinct” of a police community support officer who visited the house on her second day in the job and sensed that something was wrong.
Jodie Dunsmore felt Hutton was “hiding something” when she refused to let her in, but would not take no for an answer, leading to the discovery of Hamzah’s corpse in September 2011. He had died on December 15 2009.
Her concern and tenacity appeared to have been singularly lacking in other professionals who missed at least nine opportunities to intervene while Hamzah was alive.
His story was so heartbreaking that Hutton’s trial at Bradford Crown Court had to be restarted with a new jury after one of the original panel broke down as the evidence was read, and could not continue.
It is, tragically, only the latest in a long line of child abuse and neglect cases, from Baby P to Daniel Pelka, in which the authorities have sat on their hands until a child died.
Hutton, 43, the daughter of a nurse, came from a middle-class background and was “well-spoken”, something which appeared to have thrown some of those who came into contact with her.
She was working as a care assistant for the elderly when she met Aftab Khan, a taxi driver, and had her first child in 1989, aged 18.
The couple had seven more, including Hamzah, who was born on June 17, 2005.
By then Hutton was well-known to police, who had been called to her home repeatedly for years following beatings by Khan. They answered 999 calls from Hutton eight times between 2004 and 2008.
Hamzah was born into a family already in chaos, but following the death of Hutton’s mother on Christmas Eve 2005, she turned to drink, and repeatedly asked the police, doctors and social workers for help.
In the year after Hamzah’s birth, she asked police for help in getting away from her abusive husband, asked her GP for help with depression and requested advice from the local social services child protection unit.
Hamzah, meanwhile, was slowly starving. Having been seen at home by a midwife six days after his birth, and by a health visitor two weeks later, he was never again seen by a medical professional.
Hamzah died while his mother was at a supermarket. Later that night she ordered takeaway food for herself. She later told her children to tell teachers Hamzah had gone to live with his uncle in Portsmouth.
Police found Hamzah’s remains in a travel cot, wearing a babygrow for a six to nine month old.
Hutton previously admitted cruelty to her five youngest children, aged five to 13, who lived in the house with their brother’s corpse.