The mother of a baby boy murdered by Lucy Letby has said she feels “betrayed on every level” at being “kept in the dark” by hospital managers about his death.
The mother of the infant who died at four days old, who can only be named as Child C, told the Thirlwall inquiry her family had been “misled” by executives in a way that had “compounded our grief”.
The witness said she wanted a face-to-face apology from Ian Harvey, the former medical director of the Countess of Chester hospital, whom she accused of putting a “whitewash gloss” over the sudden and unexpected death of her son in June 2015.
Letby, 34, has been convicted of murdering Child C by injecting air into his stomach on the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England. The former nurse is serving multiple whole-life orders after also being found guilty of murdering six other babies and attempting to murder a further seven.
Giving evidence to the inquiry, chaired by Lady Justice Thirlwall, Child C’s mother said she had been “truly horrified” to discover only last year that other infants had died, or collapsed unexpectedly, around the same time as her son. She said it was “incredibly distressing” to read in the Chester Chronicle in July 2016 that an investigation had been launched into an increase in deaths on the neonatal unit, covering the time her son had died a year earlier.
The witness said she asked the hospital’s bereavement office to explain why they had not been informed about this, to be told a staff member had attempted to phone the family’s landline once – which Child C’s mother said was “outrageous”.
She told the inquiry she made multiple attempts to discover the details of the investigations into her son’s death but felt “left in the dark”. She said she met Harvey, the then medical director, who told her that “minor learning points” had been raised but nothing that would have changed the outcome for her son.
She said she left the meeting feeling that “there was absolutely no indication of anything criminal being investigated” and was told by Harvey that “a line would be drawn” under the investigation.
She told the inquiry: “That absolutely horrified me how misled we had been in that meeting and how untrue the information was that we had been told. I felt completely betrayed on every level to be honest, as a human being sat with another human being.”
Questioned by Rachel Langdale KC, the counsel to the inquiry, Child C’s mother said she wanted a personal apology from Harvey: “I feel very strongly now that Ian Harvey was desperately trying to stop us from asking further questions by providing a whitewash gloss of a report and just hoping we would take his word for it and not ask any further questions. I feel hugely betrayed by it and it added to our distress in an already distressing time.”
In an opening statement read to the inquiry last week, Harvey and other senior managers said none of the independent expert reports carried out after Letby’s removal from the neonatal unit in July 2016 had pointed to criminal wrongdoing. They said they felt they were providing “the right level of information at the right time” to parents but that “in hindsight, we should have communicated far better than we did”.
Child C’s mother also described how she felt Letby had prematurely tried to put the infant in a “cold cot” before he had died while they were spending their final moments together. She said this was “horrendous, knowing what we know now”, adding: “My concern now is she wanted us to leave him there [with her], which just doesn’t really bear thinking about to be honest. It just adds an extra horror to what we already have to think about.”
The inquiry continues.
