Teenage Mum Starves Baby To Death

A teenager branded ‘monster mum’ who left her five-month-old baby to starve to death while she went out partying for two weeks has had her appeal for a more lenient sentence rejected.

Alyona Ipatova, 19, tried to claim it was her mum and dad’s failure to teach her parenting skills that led to her leaving her baby alone in an apartment in Russia for a fortnight.

But judges who heard the appeal were so outraged they not only confirmed her sentence of a decade of hard labour, they increased it by two-and-a-half years.

Ipatova was sentenced to 10 years after being found guilty of leaving her daughter Veronika to die by a court in St Petersburg.

At the trial in September she admitted to leaving her baby alone for two weeks and finding the tragic tot dead on her return.

The crop-haired teenager told the sentence hearing: “I really regret what I did. I did not want that to happen. I realise what I have done.”

And she blamed her parents for mistreating her when she was a child.

Her lawyer Oleg Kiyashko also claimed she had asked the child’s father to help look after their daughter.

He said: “Yes, she left the child at times. Although she left her, sometimes she came back in the morning or the father was at home, so he could still look after the girl.”

But judges rejected a defence plea to alter her charge from the murder of a minor with cruelty to causing death by negligence.

Judges also rejected the prosecution’s appeal for a 19-year sentence.

Source: Mirror