Daniel Pelka

Case background and investigation

Daniel Pelka was four years old when he died on March 3, 2012, in Coventry, England. According to the BBC, he died from a head injury at his home after being starved and beaten over a period of months. He weighed just over a stone and a half, roughly 10 kilograms, and the trial judge said medical experts regarded his emaciation as unprecedented in Britain.

Daniel lived with his mother, Magdalena Luczak, and her partner, Mariusz Krezolek, both originally from Poland. In her sentencing remarks, published by the BBC, Mrs Justice Cox said their relationship began in early 2010 and that Daniel had appeared healthy before then. She found that the first sign of ill treatment was a broken arm about 14 months before his death, and that systematic cruelty probably began when he started school in September 2011.

The court heard that Daniel was denied food, made to swallow salt, forced to perform punishment exercises, subjected to cold water punishment and shut in a small room. Staff at Little Heath Primary School noticed bruising and saw him taking food from other children's lunch boxes and scavenging for food. The judge said the couple gave the school and doctors a false account that he had an eating disorder, which was designed to prevent anyone from intervening.

Luczak and Krezolek denied murder and blamed each other. A jury at Birmingham Crown Court found both guilty, and Wikipedia gives the verdict date as July 31, 2013. They were sentenced in early August 2013 to life imprisonment with minimum terms of 30 years each. In December 2014 the Court of Appeal rejected Krezolek's attempt to challenge his conviction and dismissed both defendants' claims that their sentences were excessive, the BBC reported.

A serious case review by Coventry's Safeguarding Children Board was published in September 2013. According to the BBC, it recorded 26 incidents that required police involvement at the family home between 2006 and 2010, several involving domestic abuse, and set out a series of missed opportunities involving police, health staff, social care and the school. The review concluded that Daniel had been invisible at times and that no professional had tried hard enough to speak to him directly. A GP later received a formal warning for failing to act adequately on concerns raised about the boy.

Both of the people convicted have since died in custody. Luczak, 29, was found in her cell at HMP Foston Hall in Derbyshire in July 2015, and the BBC later reported that she had been found hanged. Krezolek, 36, was found unresponsive in his cell at HMP Full Sutton on January 27, 2016.