For two years, a nine-year-old French child was left alone in an unheated flat, surviving on food scraps from his neighbors.
His mother, who abandoned him to care for himself in 2020, has been sentenced to six months in prison, which she will serve at home.
Living alone in their government flat without hot water or electricity, her son even managed to get himself to school, where his outstanding grades kept the teachers in the dark.
In the flat in Nersac, near Angoulême, southwest France, he largely lived off cakes and cold canned food, sometimes stealing tomatoes from a neighboring balcony, according to the Charente Libre newspaper.
The report stated that the youngster had to sleep under three blankets and washed in cold water. He also frequently wrapped himself in a sleeping bag.
Before one neighbor reported the matter to the authorities in 2022 under false pretenses, other neighbors assisted him by giving him food.
The mother was residing three miles away with her new lover, according to an inquiry.
The 39-year-old, who was accused of abandoning and harming a kid, allegedly visited her son occasionally to bring him food, according to testimony given to the court.
At the age of eleven, the youngster was placed in foster care and his father, who resided in a different town, was not prosecuted.
The mother told the neighbors to get out of her business and that she was taking care of her son when they voiced their concerns.
He looked clean and normal, and he received good grades, so the school decided not to sound the alarm. The mayor of Nersac, Barbara Couturier, claimed he seemed so regular.
“He was smiling, a very good pupil, always clean and polite. Nothing suggested he was abandoned. I challenge anyone who can say they would have detected this situation,” she told local media.
Although his mother claimed in court that her son had lived with her, her phone had barely been in the apartment, according to an examination of her call logs.
“When there was a family and a village around the family, if the mother neglected the child, it didn’t matter too much, because the rest of the family and the whole village took care of the child. It’s not like that any more,” a villager told local television.
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