A British mom has abandoned her six kids for a 6-week vacation with a stranger she met online. The woman shamelessly left her children behind after telling her 14-year-old son that she was leaving for the grocery store to grab a few items. What she wound up doing was hopping on a flight to Australia so she could meet a man she’d been communicating with online, leaving her son in charge of his five siblings. The youngest of the children at the time was 3-years-old.
BBC reports that the Birmingham mother, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, ignored calls by police officers. The incident occurred on January 2, and the mother has pleaded guilty to six counts of willfully abandoning her children.
Everything unraveled when the 14-year-old called his grandparents four hours after the mother took off. The woman’s parents alerted authorities. The pregnant mother chose to ignore messages from her parents and police while she fled to see her boyfriend in Australia for six weeks. She deactivated her social media accounts and refused to return home until she was scheduled to fly back in February. When she got back, she was arrested.
The pregnant mom’s flight was paid for by her boyfriend. She sees no wrong in what she did, according to reports.
Judge Murray Creed calls this “plainly a serious matter.” She was sentenced to a six month prison sentence, suspended for two years.
The mother’s attorney, John Smitheman, insist that the kids were “thriving academically and unaffected by the experience.” He claims that the children’s mom was a good parent, but was in an abusive relationship.
Smitheman adds that that raising six kids alone was a “very unusual, almost unique circumstance.”
New York Daily News reports that all six children were placed in emergency foster care before they were turned over to their grandparents.
Smitheman showed the court cards that his client’s children had made revealing how much they missed her. Judge Creed did say that before the mom abandoned the kids, they were in “a satisfactory and supportive way throughout their lives so far.”
“You’ve cared for them against a difficult background,” said Creed. “You didn’t appreciate you’d done anything wrong and were not prepared to return.”
The Inquisitr has written on other moms who have abandoned their kids. There’s one story about a mom who left behind her mentally disabled daughter so she could go to a bar and refused to take her back.
[Image via New York Daily News ]