Presentazione

da "www.timesonline.co.uk" del 19.9.09

Steve Bird

A gang intensified its hate campaign against a vulnerable mother and her two disabled children after they discovered that she had gone to the police, an inquest was told yesterday.

The “street kids”, some as young as 10, began smashing Fiona Pilkington’s windows and one parent even challenged her on her doorstep after spotting a uniformed officer leaving her house.

Mrs Pilkington, 38, contacted police 13 times in the year before she killed herself and her severely disabled daughter, Francecca, 18, by igniting petrol in her parked car in 2007.

There was never an arrest or charge, even though Leicestershire police had at least eight separate criminal Acts that they could have used to tackle the hate crimes against the family.

On the second day of the inquest, Olivia Davison, the assistant deputy coroner for Rutland and North Leicestershire, repeatedly asked why “common sense and basic old-fashioned policing” had not identified the family as extremely vulnerable. She said that their human rights were being breached because they were victims of a campaign at their home in the village of Barwell, Leicestershire.

During four hours of intense questioning from the coroner, Chris Tew, then the acting Chief Constable of Leicestershire, admitted that his force had failed to recognise that the family’s 33 pleas for help were all linked. The force classified the offences as antisocial behaviour rather than as a crime. He said that things had changed in the force and by the end of this year 2,000 officers would have been trained to spot vulnerable people who were either physically or mentally disabled.

In one exchange, Ms Davison said: “This family was patently vulnerable to the eye — you don’t need training.”

The coroner questioned why an officer who visited the family and saw that they were clearly frightened could not have done more to help. “Why wasn’t it open to him to take action? I’m hitting a wall here,” Ms Davison said.

In one incident in 2007, Anthony, who is now 19 and was sitting in the court at Loughborough Town Hall, had had stones pelted at his head by the gang as he cycled home and the police asked the council to draw up “antisocial behaviour contracts” with the offending children’s parents.

Ms Davison asked: “Would somebody not have thought of arresting someone and prosecuting them, taking them to the youth court rather than dealing with it through the council and drawing up a letter they will probably ignore?”

Mr Tew said: “It’s for an officer to decide.”

Ms Davison: “You have seven or eight Acts of Parliament and criminal offences which are smack on to deal with what this family was facing.”

Mr Tew: “If each offence can be proved and there’s evidence \.”

Mrs Pilkington, described as shy and terrified by the gang, did not want to proceed with prosecutions, preferring instead to have the children warned. But Mr Tew, now retired, agreed with the coroner that the police could have taken matters into their own hands, realising that she might not have known what was best.

Of the family’s thirteen calls made to police in the year that Mrs Pilkington and her daughter died, five resulted in no one being available to attend the family home, seven led to a visit by an officer and one in a visit from a community support volunteer, the jury was told.

In one of the family’s accounts, a child was said to have told Mrs Pilkington that the gang could do whatever they wanted and “there was nothing she could do about it”. She was described as being in utter despair, depressed and with her hair falling out from the stress. She drove her daughter to a lay-by near Earl Shilton on the A47 and doused the car in petrol before igniting it. Their charred remains were identified by DNA.

Mrs Pilkington had written a series of letters to her MP, David Tredinnick, saying that she was at a loss about how to protect her children from the “street kids”.

Mr Tew said he hoped that changes implemented after the deaths would mean that today’s force would classify the campaign waged against the Pilkington family as a hate crime against the disabled, an actual crime rather than antisocial behaviour.

The inquest continues on Tuesday.