See What Phone Obsession Cost This Mum of Four

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A mum of four, Clair Barnett, has been jailed for five years after her two-year-old son, who was playing near a pond outside their home without supervision, drowned while she was inside the house chatting on her phone and posting pictures on Facebook. The boy, Joshua, was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

According to DailyMail, Claire, who has four children by three different men, told police she ran outside ‘within 10 seconds’ of her son falling in the water but the court said it was impossible to know how long he had been there.

The court heard she had been previously warned by relatives to fence off or cover the pond after moving in to the rented house, but ignored their advice.

The court also heard that Claire had been contacted by social services months before Joshua’s death on 17 March 2014 as she regularly allowed her children play outside unsupervised on a busy road near their previous address. She was reported to authorities in August 2013 after two of her children were nearly run over by a car.

Defence barrister, Timothy Roberts, QC, said she had become distracted by a Facebook comment that was posted to her ‘rather than the other way around’, adding that: ‘Any mother going about the house can be distracted by a telephone or a washing machine. This was an incident where a message was put up which she responded to. She was not on Facebook having a long conversation. It shows the danger the of reacting immediately to unsolicited messages when there are more pressing duties to perform.’

Claire pleaded guilty to four charges of neglect after denying a charge of unlawful killing, however, the judge said her son had died as a result of her ‘utterly neglectful parenting’.

The judge, Jeremy Richardson, QC, said: ‘I don’t think it really matters how he got in the pond. The child should have been supervised. Children of a young age do all sorts of things, it is there way. This sort of pond would put terror in the mind of any normal parent. You only need to watch the behaviour of good and dedicated mother who take their children to a duck pond. They watch them like hawks in case they fall in and drown…If you should have any further children, they will almost certainly be removed from you.’