Family hail justice for little ones as mother jailed over four boys’ fire deaths
Family hail justice for little ones as mother jailed over four boys’ fire deaths
Share:
The family of four young boys killed in a house fire have said “justice has been done”, as their mother was jailed for 10 years for leaving them home alone. Deveca Rose was in Sainsbury’s when her two sets of twins, aged three and four, became trapped in a blaze at the family home on the evening of December 16 2021.
Rose, 30, who had split up with her partner and suffered from mental health problems, was found guilty of four counts of manslaughter after a trial at the Old Bailey. On Friday, Rose sobbed with her head covered in the dock of Court One as she was jailed for 10 years.
In a televised sentencing, Judge Mark Lucraft KC described the “tragic case” in which the boys were left by Rose in an “unsafe” house when the fire started. He told Rose: “Had you been at home when a fire started, you may have been able to extinguish it, or if not, you would have been able to get the children safely out of the house.
“But you were not there, and the children were too young to know what to do. As a result of what you did, they were all killed.”. None of the items Rose had gone to Sainsbury’s to buy that day was “essential or vital”. The judge told Rose: “Your children were particularly vulnerable due to their age, and it is clear that the last moments of their young lives would have been with some acute physical suffering as the fire took hold and they sought to get away from it.”.
