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Parents of baby who died wedged between wall and bed while they went on drinking binge will not face charges (Excerpt)

Parents of baby who died wedged between wall and bed while they went on drinking binge will not face charges (Excerpt)

 

Source: The Telegraph

6 April 2016

 

The parents of a month-old baby who died as they went on a 24-hour Christmas drinking binge and forgot where they had left him have avoided prosecution.

 

Freddie Neil was found lying on the floor wedged between a wall and bed in his older brother’s room and pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

 

His parents Matthew Neil and Kim Smart-Neil were arrested and charged with neglect and manslaughter.

 

But the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) later decided to drop charges after deciding there was not enough evidence. Details of the baby’s death have been revealed after a serious case review.

 

It found how his mother and alcoholic father spent the 24 hours beforehand drinking a “large quantity of alcohol” in a pub and with friends at their home in Blackpool, Lancashire.

 

The mother, 32, last remembered attending to Freddie at around 5am and her husband, a local DJ, stayed up with the baby until around 6am when their friends left.

 

An inquest heard that Mr Neil, 34, who was “extremely tired and intoxicated”, remembered taking Freddie to bed but could not say how he came to be in their other son Alex’s room.

 

He was woken at around noon the following day – Boxing Day – by Alex crying at the stair gate with his nappy off and excrement on the floor.

 

Mr Neil, who had turned down help for his alcoholism weeks earlier, changed Alex’s nappy before noticing Freddie was not in his basket.

 

After searching the house, he then found him unresponsive and partially wrapped in blankets on the floor between a wall and bed in Alex’s room, but neither parent could say how he got there.

 

The father tried CPR, but the baby was pronounced dead after being taken to Blackpool Victoria Hospital.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/06/parents-of-baby-who-died-wedged-between-wall-and-bed-while-they/