The mother, grandmother and sister of a vulnerable teenager who died weighing less than six stone have appeared in court accused of his manslaughter.
Jordan Burling, 18, was found by paramedics in the living room of his house in Farnley, Leeds, in what prosecutor Nicholas Lumley QC described as a “shocking and disturbing” scene.
“Jordan was lying, utterly helpless, on an inflatable mattress in a cluttered living room. He was little more than skin and bones, he weighed 37kg – less than six stones. He wore a soiled nappy under some pyjamas,” Leeds Crown Court heard.
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Opening the case, Lumley said that an expert dietician who had worked in the area for 26 years “had never seen such malnutrition... and likened the condition of the body to that found in World War Two extermination camps”.
Lumley told the court that Burling died from acute bronchopneumonia, a result of his malnutrition, immobility and infection-riddled sores.
According to Sky News, Yorkshire Ambulance Service employee Bridget Shepherd told the court that Burling’s mother, Dawn Cranston, showed “no emotion” as her son went into cardiac arrest. Shepherd reportedly said: “She did not seem bothered by what was going on. She did not seem to be in shock.”
‘Nobody’ responsible
Jurors were told that Burling “had lived a relatively normal life until he was taken out of school at the age of 16 and homeschooled by his mother”, reports The Independent.
He was not known to be suffering from an illness or medical condition that could have caused his rapid decline in health and eventual death, the court heard.
Burling’s grandmother, Denise Cranston, told police that her grandson’s health deteriorated about three months prior to his death, on 30 June 2016.
“He went to the toilet one day and said something had cracked in his leg. He then decided he wasn’t going to walk,” she told police.
According to the BBC, she said that following an incident about five years earlier when Jordan was turned away from a GP surgery because they arrived “a minute late”, the teenager refused to seek medical help.
She said: “I think we just got on with it, Dawn and me, we [carried out Jordan’s care] between us because he wouldn’t have entertained a doctor.”
Asked by police if she was responsible for her grandson’s death, she replied “no” and that “nobody” was to blame.
Burling’s estranged father, Steven Burling, told the court that he last saw his son about six months before his death, and that Jordan looked pale and drawn.
According to the Daily Mail, he said that Dawn Cranston had been “a good mum, a caring mum” in the years they were together.
‘Concealing the birth of a child’
The court also heard about the discovery of a baby’s remains in plastic bags when police searched the family’s home.
It could not be established whether the full-term baby boy, believed to be the child of Dawn Cranston and Steven Burling, had been born dead or alive, Lumley said.
“Within what would have been Jordan’s bedroom, officers found a small rucksack, within which were plastic bags inside plastic bags,” he added, and the baby’s bones were then discovered in the “rancid smelling” wrapping.
Dawn Cranston has pleaded guilty to a charge of concealing birth of a child by secretly disposing of body.
