Editor: Thanasis Gavos
One of the harshest juvenile abuse videos came to light in Britain on Tuesday night, after it was shown in Coventry jury trial of father and mother on murder charges.
The video, from an indoor CCTV camera, shows 6-year-old Arthur Lampinzo-Hughes getting up from the living room floor of his house where he was forced to sleep for days.
The blond boy is bony, with his pajamas hanging over him. With difficulty and with an expression of pain in his face, he finally manages to stand up and with difficulty pulls his quilt and pillow to another room.
In the audio accompanying the video, little Arthur is heard shouting four times crying “nobody loves me” and seven times “nobody feeds me” in 44 seconds. In total it takes more than two minutes to walk, obviously limping, a distance of two meters.
The video from the house in Solihull in the center-west of England is from June 16, 2020. The next day Arthur is believed to have been murdered by his 29-year-old father Thomas Hughes and his 32-year-old mother Emma Tastin, who deny murder and abuse allegations.
According to the police investigation, Arthur lost his life when his mother hit him hard on the head several times on a hard surface.
The court heard that the little boy suffered fatal brain damage from a long-term treatment of savagery described as “the medical definition of child torture”.
Among other things, Arthur was left hungry, forced to stand for 14 hours a day and poisoned with salt.
Jurors heard more than 200 audio messages sent by Taston to Hughes in which Arthur could be heard crying. Taston often commented on the accompanying text messages “started again” or something similar. Arthur is heard in some of the messages asking for something to drink or his grandmother, while Taston is sometimes heard ordering him to stay still.
Hughes responded to the messages with phrases such as “dig his grave”, “I will cut off his head” or urging his partner to throw his son in the trash.
Hughes took custody of the child when his mother was accused of killing her new partner in February 2019.
Theirs continues.
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