Thread by @RoadsideMum

When children are murdered there is RAGE in the air.

Rage for the killers, all the more so if it was the parents, all the more so if the child was promising, all the more so if agencies failed the child.

Where are the columns? The viral tweets? Blogs? Hello?

They murdered her!

I left her name out on purpose. A little girl of 15 with sporting talent and a lively school life, and 5 siblings, and both parents, and all the adaptations she needed for a good quality of life, and they murdered her slowly over months. She rotted alive. WHY AREN'T YOU RAGING?

Can we get some honesty in the room here?

You aren't raging because she was fat. She was disabled. She was common.

You aren't raging because you don't see her as the equal of any other child.

And I am raging at you for it.

Someone needs to write a column. Now.

Kaylea Titford was the equal of any of you and any of your children. You are none of you better or worse than she was (unless you murdered a child, then you aren't equal to shit on a shoe).

Hello??? RAGE YOU FUCKERS.

She mattered.

#KayleaTitford

If the press won't write a fucking column, I will. And I don't even care if no one is reading. I'm going to set it out in notes right now because I have waited all day to read this and apparently nobody has even written it. So let's do the commentariats job for it, for free...

Kaylea Titford was an active, independent, funny little girl, who used a wheelchair because of disabilities she had had from birth. She showed promise at wheelchair basketball and had attended tryouts for the Paralympic team. She was loved by her school and had a large family...

That family should have loved her, they should have cherished her as a sister and daughter and they did not. The outrageous text her father sent the night she died telling her to be quiet in her pain wasn't out of character, it was the final act of 7 months of brutal neglect...

Questions will inevitably be asked, as they rightly should, about why, in the month between Kaylea failing to return to school and her heartbreaking and degrading slow death, no social worker, police officer or educational welfare worker was sent to the house...

But the bigger question is, how could her mother, her father, and at least one sibling of enough age to be expected to know what was happening to Kaylea wasn't right, were in that house every day of her life and not one of them called her a doctor, or any other kind of help...

It's not as if they lacked insight. Kayleas mother Sarah Lloyd-Jones was a carer. Currently it's not clear if that means she claimed the role as Kayleas full time carer or if she was a paid professional engaging in caring for others, but Kaylea wasn't cared for at all...

Kayleas father initially denied manslaughter, claiming it was Lloyd-Jones responsibility to look after Kaylea. He hasn't set foot in her bedroom in the 13 days before she was found, cold and crawling with maggots in infected sores on her shit stained sheets and puppy pads...

Kayleas bedroom was on the ground floor, a hoist was fitted to her bed, which had easy clean mattresses. Her ensuite was just 2 paces or so from the end of her bed and yet no effort had been made to wash her in weeks, the coroner observed...

Her toenails had not been cut, piss bottles had not been removed, and Kayleas wheelchair had been taken away- the space it could have occupied, instead filled with junk - a fridge, a pressure washer, a plastic cutlery tray, food debris, actual shit on her bathroom floor...

And yet, these parents who couldn't trouble themselves to get this talented, helpless little girl up, found a moment to heap takeaways on her. What was there for her to do but eat them? It is no wonder her father describes her as "lonely" she must have been entirely bereft...

Towards the end of her life, tiny 4ft8 Kaylea had amassed over 22stone in weight, giving her a BMI of 70, far bigger than she went into that bedroom, for the 7 month long miserable and horrific imprisonment which eventually took her life- as it was always intended to...

There simply is no way to look at your own child laying day on day, requiring your help to get up, complete hygiene tasks or access the world beyond those 4 walls, and then kinda forget to do stuff. Her parents made an active choice to shut the door on her, until she went away...

Except when they were bringing takeaway after takeaway. Kaylea turned 16 almost 2 weeks before she died. Her birthday cake lay untouched on a surface in her room. Perhaps she kept it to cherish a moment of slightly-less unhappiness. Perhaps she was trying to watch her eating...

We will never know now. She xant tell us her thoughts anymore. maybe nobody knows. Who spent time with her to ask?

Just like so much other junk in that room, Kaylea was a chore no one wanted to attend to. So no one did. Until eventually she died alone...

The 999 call, perhaps most damning of all the evidence reveals that even in death, no efforts were wasted on this poor, precious child....

When Alun Titford was advised by the 999 operator to move Kaylea's unresponsive body onto the floor so they could try to help her, her useless piece of shit father can be heard on the call saying that his son and partner are upstairs and he doesn't want to go and wake them...

As press headlines sensationalised Kayleas weight, as though she somehow brought herself to this position, we are losing sight of that she was utterly powerless against a concerted, spiteful and callous neglect, perpetuated from the moment the doors shut at lockdown...

We are well overdue a serious national conversation about our attitude to disability and the worth of disabled people. A child died, in filth, and disdain not run over days or weeks but over 7 months without reprieve, and all we have to say is "she was fat"?

She was murdered.

THERE you fuckers. Now go make that into an article. No credit required. One of you overpaid hack bastards can write it for the morning. WHY haven't you yet? We see you.