Woman obsessed with computer game left children to eat cold baked beans

A mother who became so obsessed with a computer game that she left her children to eat cold baked beans from the tin has been given a suspended jail sentence and banned from using computers. The woman also allowed her German Shepherd and lurcher dogs to starve to death and left them rotting in the dining room for two months as she played Small World on the internet almost non-stop. After a neighbour peered through the letterbox and saw the appalling conditions, the NSPCC were told and police officers entered the home and saw the decay and filth. The children had been given no hot food and were forced to eat cold baked beans from the tin without any spoons.

The 33-year-old widow, who cannot be identified, admitted three charges of child cruelty and two of animal neglect. Maidstone Crown Court was told the children, aged nine, 10 and 13, were badly neglected for six months. Deepak Kapur, prosecuting, said when officers arrived at the house in Swanley, Kent, in February the woman told them it was in a bit of a mess. They then saw rubbish strewn all over the floor in all rooms, mouldy food and a swarm of flies. The toilet was in a disgusting state. The woman tried to block officers from entering the dining room and when asked why she replied: "All right, my dogs are in there. They are dead. I killed them.



"I probably starved them, probably because I have been playing the computer game all the time." Mr Kapur said: "Police discovered the bodies of the dogs. Flies were around them. The smell was so overpowering, making the officers wretch." The mother had become hooked on the computer game featuring dwarves and giants and in which players vie for conquest and control of a world that is simply too small to accommodate them all, after an invitation from a friend on Facebook. She started playing initially for an hour a day in late 2009 but since August of that year it had become an obsession to the point where she was only getting two hours sleep a night, said Mr Kapur. She then began to feed her children only on foods that did not need cooking such as pot noodles, sandwiches, chips and pies.

Allan Compton, defending, said the woman had been a devoted and competent mother until tragedy struck some years ago with the death of her husband from a heart attack. "She retreated into this virtual world provided by her laptop computer," he said. "She shut herself off from the outside world and operated in the real world on a very basic level." The mother was sentenced to six months imprisonment suspended for two years and ordered to do 75 hours unpaid work. She was banned from keeping animals.