Addicted mother fed 9-year-old son heroin

A DRUG addict mother who supplied her son with heroin and crack cocaine from the age of nine was jailed for nine years yesterday.

Emma Kelly, 31, gave her son heroin at the school gates, Hove Crown Court heard.

Judge Anthony Niblett told her she had betrayed her son.

Kelly showed no emotion at the sentencing.

Judge Niblett told her: “There can be no greater betrayal of a mother’s trust and duty towards her child.” Kelly realised that her son had been helping himself to her own drugs yet did nothing to wean him off drugs, he added.

Outside the court, Wendy Fuller of Sussex Police described how the boy was “rocking in his hospital bed, very agitated, crying for his mum” when he was experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

She added: “He did have a bond with his mum, but that was borne out of his addiction.”

The boy’s grandfather Terry Kelly said social services had failed to react to his concerns.

He said: “I’m disgusted the way they dealt with it, and the school. When he wasn’t going to school, the school should have made more inroads.”

Kelly was sentenced to nine years in total for supplying her son with Class A drugs, including five years to be served concurrently for child cruelty.

This includes two six-year sentences, to be served concurrently, for supplying him with heroin and crack cocaine, and a consecutive sentence of three-years for giving him heroin when he was in foster care.

The judge said: “You told a child psychiatrist that you realised you had a choice of informing social services of your son’s increasing opiate dependency... You allowed the situation to continue.”

He said she had lied to both social worker and schoolteachers.

The boy spent a week in hospital withdrawing from his opiate addiction after he and his mother had been picked up by police for shoplifting in January last year.

Judge Niblett said: “On May 5, 2005, you went to his school and you supplied him there with a wrap of heroin.

“This was, in my assessment, an act of pure wickedness. You offered no explanation or excuse for it, and there can be none.”

The judge praised the actions of Sussex Police, but was not so fulsome in his praise of East Sussex social services.

He said: “The facts of this case speak for themselves. Despite an increasing number of warning signs, no direct action or intervention was taken in relation to X until police intervened at the end of January 2005.”