Three-year-old boy spent Christmas home alone with dead mother he thought was sleeping

A three-year-old boy is believed to have spent days over Christmas sitting alone by the dead body of his ‘sleeping’ mother in the hope that she might ‘wake up’. At one point, his grandfather telephoned but the young child calmly told him 'mummy’s asleep’. It is not known what the boy did for food and drink. The heartbreaking tale unfolded in the French town of Loison-sous-Lens, in the northern Pas de Calais region, where Emilie Decroix, 28, collapsed.

Work colleagues in the nearby town of Lens presumed the single mother was off ill and unable to call in. Instead an aneurysm, or weak bulge in an artery wall, had ruptured close to her brain, causing the office worker to die suddenly. ‘Emilie lived alone with her little boy who clearly believed she was sleeping and might wake up,’ said a police source. ‘Before the ruptured aneurysm, she would have had all the appearances of a young, fit woman – the child could clearly not envisage that she might be dead.


Photo from here.

‘Emilie had not contacted anyone since before Christmas, suggesting that she may have died before this time. Her father spoke to her son over the phone and was simply told that she was asleep.' Emilie had lived in the house for more than a year, but was a ‘quiet and hard-working’ woman who did not socialise much. Neighbours were used to seeing her leaving the house in the early morning and dropping her son off at a local nursery, and most assumed she had gone away for the holidays.

The child’s grandfather finally called round to the house on New Year’s Eve, where he found her dead body, with his grandson sitting quietly next to her. The source added: ‘The cause of death was quickly established, but the exact time of death is not yet known. Nobody knows exactly when Emilie died, but it is likely to have been before Christmas.’ A local police spokesman said the child, who had not been named for legal reasons, was currently in the care of his grandparents and was undergoing counselling.