A horrified 13-year-old boy came home from school to find both his parents knifed to death.

Nile Daniel ran out of the terraced house shaking and in tears after stumbling on the nightmare scene.

Police believe his father Sandy Daniel, who was separated from the teenager’s mother Fiona Newton, stabbed her in a frenzied attack before slashing his own throat.

Sandy Daniel and Fiona Newton

Baffling: Sandy Daniel is thought to have stabbed ex-partner Fiona Newton then cut his own throat - though neighbours said their separation seemed amicable

Their relationship is said to have ended amicably around four years ago with Mr Daniel, 44, remaining a regular visitor.

It is not known if either of them had embarked on a new relationship after they parted.

Neighbours yesterday remembered both the former binman and Miss Newton - a trainee care worker aged 39, who was nicknamed Fluff - as kind, gentle and good-natured.

Traumatised Nile and his brother Jordan, 18, are being cared for by relatives after the discovery in Broxtowe, Nottingham, on Tuesday.

Neighbour Louise Burrell, 36, said: ‘He was stood outside the house in his school uniform, shaking and sobbing.

‘People were doing their best to comfort him before the police arrived and drove him away.

‘This is a genuine shock. It’s a quiet street where almost nothing seems to happen.’

Family friend Cathy Power, who laid flowers at the house yesterday, said: ‘I’ve known Sandy since I was young as we grew up together.

Forensics experts at Fiona Newton’s house in Broxstowe, Nottingham

Investigation: Forensics experts examine the murder scene in Fiona Newton’s house in Broxstowe, Nottingham

‘He’s going to be really missed. He’d help anyone out and he was always out on his bike in the street telling jokes.

‘Him and Fiona loved each other to bits. Everyone’s shocked.’

Another neighbour said: ‘They used to live together but over the last three or four years they’ve lived apart. Even then Sandy lived close by.

‘He was a very normal man, very friendly with everyone. Although they no longer lived under the same roof he visited on a very regular basis.’

Detectives are today trying to piece together the final hours of the couple - who lived in separate houses in the same street in Broxstowe, Nottingham - to establish what sparked the apparent murder-suicide.

Stunned neighbours said that the couple, who had two sons, had shown every sign of achieving an amicable separation.

Police and paramedics were called but both Ms Newton and Mr Daniel were pronounced dead at the scene.

Seconds after finding the bodies the schoolboy ran out into the street weeping uncontrollably.

As flowers were laid at the scene, their parents’ bodies remained inside the house for most of the day while forensic scientists continued their investigations.

A Nottinghamshire Police spokesman said a post-mortem would probably be carried out today.

A patrol car was parked outside a second property in the street, believed to be Mr Daniel’s, while an officer stood guard outside the front gate.

Earlier a police van arrived at the house and an officer used a ladder to get in through an upstairs window, before letting in colleagues through a downstairs window.

Neighbour Munetsi Mandere , 47, said: ‘To me, as neighbours they looked like a very decent family.

‘They had two extremely wonderful boys, and the mother looked to be very hard-working. The dad was more private, but all the same very gentle.

‘I remember when we came here, they had prepared a food package to welcome us as neighbours.

‘It is so tragic when it is something so close to home that has happened without any sign of a problem.’

Mr Daniel is believed to have been born in the area and to have been educated at the local comprehensive.

One neighbour, Dennis Leatherland, 64, said: ‘He was a buddy of mine and was a decent man. I spoke to him on Monday and he seemed to be fine to me.

‘I’m a bit shocked by it all. He would talk to anyone in the street and was a good bloke. He used to even put out everyone’s bins in the morning. He was a good personality around here.’

Acting Chief Inspector Will Chell, of Nottinghamshire Police, said: ‘We are treating the deaths as suspicious.

‘However officers are confining their investigation into what happened to this one address.

‘The family are grieving, but are dealing with this tragedy in the best possible way they can.’

via Mail Online.

A “BULLYING” head teacher who sat calmly eating her lunch while a pupil writhed in agony with a broken leg has been found guilty of unprofessional conduct.

Rowena Brace, 62, ignored ­pupils who begged her to help for a full 15 minutes so that she could finish her sandwiches.

Even then, she rang the boy’s father instead of calling for an ambulance, a tribunal was told.

The panel found her guilty of failing to summon medical attention to the seriously-injured boy.

But Mrs Brace is still allowed to teach again. Her formal reprimand is the lowest punishment officials can give and stays on the teachers’ register for two years.

She was also found to have ­fiddled SATS test results, by ­allowing ­pupils extra time so the school appeared to be doing ­better than it was, and of behaving “inappropriately” to a colleague by slamming a window.

A General Teaching Council tribunal in Birmingham heard that she had fostered a ­“climate of fear” at her school, regularly reducing teachers to tears.

The incident concerning the injured pupil took place at Hope Brook C of E Primary School in Longhope, Gloucs, in May 2005.

Isobel Hollis, the former acting deputy head, told how pupils begged for help when a boy was injured in a football tackle.

She said: “One or two pupils knocked on the staff door and said, ‘quick, quick’ urgently.

“But Mrs Brace continued to eat her lunch and only left the staff room 10 to 15 minutes later.

“The pupil was lying on the ground, pale and shaking. Mrs Brace said that he wanted his dad to come, so she had not called for an ambulance.”

Naina Patel, representing Mrs Brace, asked: “If the situation was so obviously urgent, why didn’t you go to see the boy yourself?”

Ms Hollis said she was scared of Mrs Brace and the “climate of fear” was so bad in the school that she did not dare interfere.

Andrew Faukes, representing the GTC, said the atmosphere was such that when Ms Hollis found the injured pupil on the football field she was more concerned with checking that the register would be OK in the ­afternoon than in his health.”

Mrs Brace, of Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, became head at a stressful time after two schools merged in 2001. Six years later she had been sacked after complaints from staff and parents.

The committee panel heard that bullying, shouting and door slamming was common and it was “a daily occurrence” for a teacher to be reduced to tears.

Mrs Brace, who had denied all the counts of misconduct levelled against her, was cleared of ­inappropriate behaviour towards four other members of staff.

Another teacher told how the head downgraded Foundation Stage Profile results. Mair Blackman said: “I was shocked. If FSP results are low and Key Stage 1 results are normal a year later, it makes the school sound fantastic, doesn’t it?”

Mrs Brace sobbed as she told the committee she wanted to find a job teaching at primary schools or colleges “as soon as possible”, adding: “I still feel that I have a lot to offer before I retire.”

via Daily Express.

A seven-year-old girl was starved to death by her mother so severely that her state of emaciation was unheard of by British medical experts, a court has heard.
Khyra Ishaq was found by paramedics resembling the victim of an African famine.
She had been denied food for five months and kept shut away from the world, a jury was told.

The kitchen of her home, which was full of food, was kept locked while she and five other children were fed the occasional bowl of porridge in their room, which they had to share and were forced to eat with their hands.

They were all repeatedly beaten with a cane and forced to stand near-naked outside in the cold as punishments if they complained or misbehaved.

Neighbours reported hearing children screaming in the night and cries of “let me out, let me out”, the jury was told.

One, Amandeep Kaur, saw a distressed Khyra six weeks before she died, standing outside in the early hours of the morning wearing a vest and pants, and whimpering. She later told police: “I couldn’t really see any meat on her, it was all bones”.

Another reported seeing her in her back garden near the bird table looking “thin and very much underfed”.

By the time Khyra died, in April 2008, Timothy Raggatt, prosecuting, said she was “starved to the point that is almost unique” in British medical experience. Her body mass index was so low there was no figure for it.

Mr Raggatt said one expert medical witness reported that he had “never seen in this country a case of malnutrition of this kind”.

He added: “She was so emaciated and her weight and developmental features were so extraordinary and out of kilter with normality that they cannot be measured on any child development data in this western country of ours.

“The reality is that she had been starved and starved and starved for weeks and weeks and weeks. The cruelty and maltreatment of that little girl was both calculated and obviously deliberate.”

He said Khyra’s mother, Angela Gordon 34, and her boyfriend, Junaid Abuhamza, 30, a Muslim convert born Samuel Williams, had for reasons that may never become clear, decided in December 2007 to lock Khyra away in the three-bedroom house in Leyton Rd, Handsworth, Birmingham, and systematically starve her and the other children.

He said Khyra was taken out of school and kept prisoner in her home while Gordon and Abuhamza “isolated” her and the others “from the rest of the world.”

Several attempts by the authorities to gain access to the house were greeted with hostility and they were refused entry.

Jury members openly wept as they saw harrowing photographs of Khyra’s body.

Birmingham Crown Court heard that Khyra and the children slept in one room upstairs in the terraced home, despite there being two other upstairs rooms.

For months, despite a fridge, freezer and cupboards being full of food, they were occasionally given porridge, or a bit of fruit or dried bread.

Mr Raggatt said: “The supply of food was carefully controlled. The children were prevented from feeding themselves as they might have done had they been hungry. And hungry they got.

“If they took food they were punished. They were hit or made to go into detention.”

The court heard two of the other children were close to death. A book on child raising, which had the section on nutrition marked, was found in the adult’s bedroom.

Abuhamza, from Birmingham, denies murder and has admitted five charges of cruelty relating to the other children, who cannot be named.

Gordon, who was dressed in a black headscarf and black robes, denies murder and five charges of cruelty.

The trial continues.

via The Telegraph.

Shocking failures by social services to protect a newborn baby from her drug addict mother and brutal father were revealed today.

The tiny baby was subjected to horrific abuse, suffering nine fractured ribs, two broken legs and a broken collar bone by the time she was six weeks old.

The couple also failed to get ‘Baby H’ any medical help after she contracted meningitis, despite her becoming seriously ill.

Alliah Bradshaw (left), was sentenced to three years and Rizwan Patel for four-and-a-half years after admitting child cruelty charges

Although she survived, the baby was left deaf, blind, brain damaged and severely disabled with cerebral palsy.

Today Rizwan Patel (right), 27, was jailed for four-and-a-half years and Alliah Bradshaw, 29, for three years after admitting charges relating to the baby’s mistreatment at Bradford Crown Court.

It emerged that Bradshaw had been monitored by social workers for at least five years and previously had her two other young sons taken from her.

Baby H - who is now aged two-and-a-half - suffered the appalling cruelty despite being on the at risk register.

Social workers from Calderdale Council were ‘determined to keep a watchful eye’ on Baby H as a result of the mother’s appalling history, but it was deemed ‘appropriate’ for her to remain with the couple.

Bradshaw and Patel, from Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, received regular visits from health and support workers after Baby H was born in January 2007.

These continued until the baby was admitted to hospital in early March and taken out of their care.

Both parents admitted two offences of child cruelty through neglect, relating to their failure to seek help and medical treatment for their baby.

Patel also pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm. The court heard he shook Baby H violently, causing rib and collar bone fractures in the process.

Baby H also suffered fractures to both thigh bones and a lower leg, probably caused by being brutally forced into clothing while she was being dressed.

Details of the final days before she was eventually taken to hospital revealed appalling neglect.

On March 1 Bradshaw, a long term drug addict, left Patel to meet her ex-partner and sit in a park smoking crack cocaine.

In her absence the inexperienced father shook Baby H in a fit of temper when she wouldn’t stop crying, leaving her with multiple fractures.

The baby was clearly in agony, yet nothing was done to take her to see a doctor.

Over the next four days Baby H began passing and coughing blood and vomiting.

The defendants ignored advice from health professionals, who told them on at least three occasions to take the child to hospital for x-rays.

On March 5 a health worker was anxious to examine the baby’s leg but was persuaded not to by the couple who said the baby had just settled and should not be disturbed.

They had covered her up to her shoulders with a blanket.

The next day Patel finally took her to their local GP who were so concerned by the baby’s ‘grey’ appearance she was immediately rushed to Calderdale Royal Infirmary by ambulance.

As well as the bruises and broken bones she was diagnosed with meningitis and septicaemia.

Now in foster care, she cannot sit up or feed herself unaided.

She has had surgical implants to help with her deafness, splints on her legs, daily physiotherapy and because of her lop-sided body she needs a special sleeping device.

Passing sentence, Judge Jonathan Rose condemned the couple’s failure to seek medical attention and said: ‘These actions were inexplicable, deplorable and indefensible.’

He continued: ‘She was unwell with what turned out to be very grave illnesses which would cause her long-term catastrophic consequences.

‘The real suffering is to come for a long time in the future because her life has been effectively ruined.

‘She is condemned to a future of suffering, she will need constant and indefinite care.’

The court heard Bradshaw’s first child became known to social services when he was rescued from a burning crack den where Bradshaw had left him in the care of drug users. Luckily he was rescued by firefighters.

In 2002 he was permanently removed from her care after he was found wandering the streets, partially clothed and covered in his own excrement, while Bradshaw bought drugs in a phone box.

In March 2003 her second child was taken away from her by social services due to her excessive drug use.

A serious case review has been carried out by Calderdale’s safeguarding children’s board and the results are expected to be released later this year.

via Mail Online.