Austrian mother (33) who starved son, put her in a dog kennel and tortured her, gets 20 years in prison: “A few hours later and he would have been dead” | Abroad

Everything came to light on November 22, 2022, when the then twelve-year-old boy was taken to hospital in a coma and completely hypothermic. His mother was arrested the next day and locked up in a prison in Krems an der Donau, west of the capital Vienna.

It turned out that the boy suffered horrific punishment from his mother. Over a period of several months, the mother regularly doused her son with cold water, leaving the apartment windows open, even in freezing temperatures. The mother also beat the boy, deprived him of food, tied him up and often locked him in a small dog cage for hours. The videos she took of him show the boy losing the ability to move and speak. The child lost a lot of weight in just a few months. In the end he weighed barely forty kilos, even though he was 1.65 m tall.

On November 22, his body temperature dropped to 26.8 degrees Celsius due to the cold water torture. As a result, the boy ended up in a coma. Doctors had to do everything they could to save his life.

During court hearings, the accused woman indicated that she wanted to “discipline” the boy and expressed her remorse, the Austrian news agency APA wrote. According to the chairwoman of the assize court, the psyche of the now thirteen-year-old child has been “in any case completely destroyed”.

According to the defense, the authorities may have failed. The boy’s school had repeatedly sounded the alarm. A few weeks before the boy was admitted to hospital, he had also run away – he had fled from the apartment via the balcony – and he had asked family to take him in. However, the police brought him back home, writes the Austrian newspaper ‘Der Standard’.

In addition, there were also two visits from the youth care office, the newspaper ‘Kronen Zeitung’ points out, on October 28 and November 19, four days before the boy ended up in a coma. The employees complained that the child had no bed – there was only a mattress in the room – and that the child was cold. They also found that the apartment smelled terribly of urine. But the young victim was not brought to safety.

The fact that the violence eventually came to an end is thanks to a social worker, who was not initially involved in the case. After the boy’s condition became life-threatening, the mother and a second accomplice contacted her. She convinced the mother to call the ambulance. “Now!” It wasn’t a moment too soon. “If he had been taken to hospital a few hours later that day, he would have been dead,” the court heard.

The 40-year-old woman who was an accomplice was sentenced to fourteen years in prison on Thursday, together with the mother. Her role in the story is very striking: it was she who had encouraged the single mother, through extensive chat messages and telephone conversations, to commit violence against the child. The woman, herself a mother of four children, was the mother’s best friend and really instigated her in the abuse. It was also she who came up with the idea of ​​cold water punishment, Austrian media write.

The court has the impression that the mother had deep feelings of love for the second, “very manipulative” defendant. She seemed to do absolutely everything she told her to do. She also gave a large portion of her money to the woman.

The 40-year-old denied in court that she was aware of the extent of the abuse suffered by the boy, despite numerous telephone conversations with the mother – including photos and videos of the abuse being shared – proving otherwise .

The court has ordered that both women be placed in a forensic psychiatric center. The psychiatric examination showed that they have “serious and lasting psychological problems”, without having lost their judgment.