Pair convicted of starving and murdering child
A jury at Birmingham Crown Court convicted Magdelena Luczak and Mariusz Krezolek of killing Daniel Pelka after hearing how he was denied food, regularly “imprisoned” in a locked room, force-fed salt and made to perform arduous punishment exercises.
The boy’s murder, which occurred weeks after teaching staff saw him with bruising to his neck and black eyes, is the subject of a serious case review by Coventry’s Safeguarding Children Board.
Neither Krezolek nor Luczak, who will be sentenced tomorrow, showed any obvious emotion as the guilty verdicts were returned after around four hours of deliberation. A nine-week trial at Birmingham Crown Court heard the couple, both originally from Poland, hid the horrifying abuse by claiming Daniel had an eating disorder.
Jurors were also told how Daniel was left to die in his unheated “cell” for around 33 hours after suffering a fatal head injury at his Coventry home on March 1 last year.
Former soldier Krezolek — described in court as a heartless “monster” – and Luczak blamed each other for Daniel’s death during the trial. But text messages between the pair proved they worked as a team to inflict the sickening abuse and even decided not to summon an ambulance as Daniel lay dying with more than 20 separate injuries.
The pair also carried out Google searches (including one for “patient in a coma”) which suggested the youngster had been beaten, subjected to an attempted drowning, and poisoned with salt in his final hours.
Krezolek, by his own admission, also went online to check his bank account and the price of car tyres after Daniel, who weighed just 1 stone 9lb, was repeatedly struck around the head, causing his brain to swell.
The serious case review will examine why social services and police did not become involved after staff at Coventry’s Little Heath Primary School noticed bruising on his neck and what appeared to be two black eyes.
Although the injuries to the neck were entered in a concerns book at Daniel’s school, no written record was made of the later bruising seen around his eyes.
The trial heard Luczak played a leading role in convincing teachers and medical professionals that Daniel’s dramatic weight loss, which left him looking like a famine victim, was due to a rare genetic disorder.
The serious case review is also expected to look into contact between doctors and Daniel, who was seen by a community paediatrician and found to be underweight but not “wasted” three weeks before his death. During the meeting with the paediatrician, Dr Supratik Chakraborthy, Krezolek laughed out loud as Luczak explained how Daniel had once eaten discarded chips he had picked up from a pavement.
Medical records show Daniel weighed 14.8kg in Jan 2011 and 13.8kg three weeks before his death.
But the schoolboy, who had developed normally until Jan 2011, weighed just 10.7kg and was in a state of “skeletal emaciation” at the time of his death on Mar 3 last year.
Although he should have been around 3ft 9in, he was only 3ft 3in because his bones had stopped growing due to food deprivation over at least three months and possibly up to nine months.
Factory worker Krezolek and Luczak, who did not ill-treat a sibling of Daniel, were both drinking heavily and taking drugs, including cannabis and amphetamine, at the time of the abuse.
The couple, who never took Daniel to see his GP, had previously colluded in covering up an earlier act of cruelty in which Daniel’s left arm was broken “clean in half” by Krezolek in a fit of temper.
Social services closed their file on Daniel five months after the injury was passed off as an accident in January 2011.
In their evidence to the court, Krezolek, 34, and Luczak, 27, admitted they had gone to sleep on both nights that Daniel lay dying in the box room, and even had sex after his death.
