Danielle Massey had been using an app called Cooking Madness: A Chef’s Game for 26 minutes while her baby son was alone. A mother who played a cooking game on her phone as her baby son was left alone to drown in a bathtub has been jailed for manslaughter.
![[Baby Charlie was left unsupervised by his mother, who claimed she went back downstairs and had to sit on the sofa to catch her breath]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/04/15/14/82c82102-c8ec-45fd-ad93-8ff721fa1239.jpg)
Seven-month-old Charlie Goodall fell out of his unstable bath seat into the water after Danielle Massey left him unsupervised at their home in County Durham. Teesside Crown Court heard Charlie was found unresponsive in the bath when police were called by paramedics to a house in West Chilton Terrace, Chilton, on 16 February 2022.
Massey, 31, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, saying she accepted it was her fault the seat was not properly fixed to the bath. She also admitted possession of cannabis and said she had smoked a joint on the day Charlie died. The defendant denied intentionally leaving Charlie unsupervised for a prolonged period of time, telling the court she had left the ground floor bathroom to go upstairs and get a towel for him.
Massey, who is asthmatic, claimed she then went back downstairs and had to sit on the sofa to catch her breath before closing her eyes. She said she went into the bathroom to find Charlie unresponsive in the bath and called 999. The court heard she gave varying accounts of how long Charlie had been left unattended, ranging from two to 10 minutes.
Asked about digital evidence showing she had been using an app called Cooking Madness: A Chef’s Game for 26 minutes during the time when Charlie was alone, Massey said she had not been actively playing the game at the time of his death and it was just running in the background.
