With Malice Aforethought

"How could anyone believe it to be normal for a child to scavenge around bins to access waste; and to steal food from the lunch boxes? What human being, with the slightest understanding of children, would not have been concerned enough to take action?
"He was literally wasting away. His starvation was so chronic his bones stopped growing. His starvation is unprecedented in this country."
Judge Laura Cox, London, England

This was a four year old child. A child who was subjected to "deliberate, escalating brutality". It seems inhumanly impossible for any sane adults, let alone the biological mother of a four year old child, and the child's step-father to so horribly maltreat and abuse a small, helpless child. It seems almost equally unbelievable that this child was not kept isolated, away from public eyes, but attended school.

West Midlands Police / The Associated Press

Yet the child's teachers at his school in Coventry, central England, appeared to see nothing amiss when the little boy attended classes covered with bruises, and with time his small frame becoming increasingly emaciated. His condition appeared to elicit no alarm from anyone. The little boy's condition simply become more aggravated, increasingly morbid, leading to his death.

Police at trial described the horrific abuse the child had suffered having turned him from a "bright-eyed boy" into "a broken bag of bones". A broken bag of bones of a helpless, vulnerable child whom no one could recognize as desperately needing rescue from impending death. No one intervened. His dire condition escaped everyone's notice.

How is that even remotely possible? At his death the little boy weighed 10.7 kilograms. The tragedy of the child's suffering is impossible to imagine. That such a helpless little human being could be subjected to such cruelty and torture and there was no one anywhere who took the trouble to investigate, to satisfy themselves that they were pursuing an obligation is beyond belief.

The school administration were admonished by the child's mother not to feed him. He suffered, she claimed, from an eating disorder. Why wouldn't the school administration insist on seeing medical documentation to validate that claim? Why would no one have taken it upon themselves to look into the matter? Why did no one care?

Magdelena Luczak and her partner Mariusz Krezolek are now each blaming the other for the child beatings, starvation and death. After his long period of degraded and deliberate neglect for his emotional and bodily needs, he was beaten and left alone in an unheated, cell-like room, there to die. The room's door handle had been removed, the keyhole blocked.

"The small hand and finger marks on the inside of that door provided a poignant image of his desperate attempts to escape" his tortured confinement, the judge noted in her sentencing remarks. For the atrocities committed on little Daniel Pelka, Magdelena Luczak and Mariusz Krezolek have guaranteed themselves an honoured place on the devil's honour roll.

For the thirteen months of increasing violence they inflicted on that child, force-feeding him salt to make him vomit, holding him underwater until he fell into unconsciousness, killing him gradually and unspeakably horribly, causing him to suffer and be offered no compassion from any quarter, those two murderers were sentenced to 30 years in prison. It is not enough.

In horrible pain, while imprisoned during the last days of his life from a dreadful blow to his head, it still took him thirty hours to die. Thirty hours in which his mother and her partner chose to continue with their life as they normally would, choosing not to call an ambulance for the dying child.

They are living monsters.