33-year-old Leroy S. from Aalsmeer remembers nothing about the kidnapping and abuse of his children in the night of March 5 to 6, of which he is suspected. His eight-day-old baby suffered a skull fracture that night. The Public Prosecution Service does not want the father to go to jail again, but today it is demanding community service and mandatory treatment.
This became apparent during the substantive hearing of the case. That night, S. allegedly drove to the home of the mother of his children, where he aggressively removed the three children from the house and took them with him. The mother has parental authority over the children.
When picking up the children, he allegedly placed or threw the youngest, an 8-day-old girl, forcefully onto a bed, causing her head to hit the edge of the bed and causing a fracture in her skull. “Daddy threw the baby,” his eldest child said.
Gas
S. then takes a taxi together with his children. On the way he calls the police. In that conversation he confessed that he had ‘left a mess’ in the home of his girlfriend and children. He says that he turned over the gas stove in the house and it smells of gas. S. also says that he is a firearms hazard and holds his children at gunpoint.
That reading is based on recordings of the conversation with the control room. His eldest child talks about the taxi ride: “Dad told me to be quiet and not to ask questions. He said he would hit me if I didn’t,” said the 7-year-old boy. In the taxi, the suspect also threatened to throw the baby in a container.
Importance of publicity
Niels van Wersch, S.’s lawyer, requested the court not to allow the press to attend the substantive hearing because this would harm the privacy of S.’s children. After a brief pause, the court ruled that the importance of public access to legal proceedings outweighs the interest of the children’s privacy. “If we have to refuse the press to all suspects with children, the end will be lost.”
The police take the matter very seriously and drive straight to the street, where they find the children’s mother ‘barefoot and in her bathrobe’ on the street. The woman states that S. arrived at her home drunk and aggressive, destroyed household goods and threatened her with death. Out of fear, she fled outside, where she hid in the bushes.
Because S. himself had reported the smell of gas, the emergency services decide that local residents must also go outside and the street is closed off. The mother does not know at that time that S. has taken the children and dropped them off with his mother – the children’s grandmother. From there, S. takes another taxi, but he doesn’t get far. On the Kruisweg in Hoofddorp the taxi gets a stop sign and becomes S. arrested by officers wearing bulletproof vests.
Ankle band
After that night he was imprisoned for six months. But the Public Prosecutor decided during a preparatory hearing on August 25 that S. could await his case in freedom, but with an ankle bracelet. To protect his children from him, he had to adhere to a contact and location ban.
He is now allowed to see his children again for two hours a week under the watchful eye of his own mother. The children’s mother cooperates in this visitation arrangement, and even brings the three from Aalsmeer to the Zaan region every weekend. S. now lives there with his mother.
“The children must have been very scared”
The Public Prosecutor takes S. seriously for putting his children in an unsafe situation and for seeing things they should not have seen. “They must have been very scared,” she estimates.
S. deeply regrets what he did, but says he can hardly remember anything about that night. He attributed this to the amount of alcohol he had drunk in the hours before. “During my time in prison, I often walked around the courtyard to try to remember what happened. It’s very frightening that I can’t.”
Previous conviction
Yet he also made a mistake in 2022: he took one of the children without the mother’s permission. He was convicted of withdrawing the child from custody. But his lawyer Niels van Wersch emphasizes that S. thought he could take the children with him because he is the father. He never realized that that wasn’t possible, because he never officially recognized the children.
“Is a 7-year-old’s statement enough?”
The lawyer also believes that it has not been proven that the eight-day-old baby’s head injury was caused by Leroy S. He finds his eldest son’s statement too meager to serve as the most important evidence. “Is the statement of a 7-year-old sufficient?” Van Wersch wonders.
The lawyer reports that the baby has been examined and will not have any lasting consequences from the fracture in her skull. According to him, the most important thing is to prevent S. from making the same mistake again, although experts estimate the risk of this to be high.
‘Enough’
The lawyer asks the court not to impose community service on his client, because he may then be overextended again. Something that, according to the probation service, was an important factor in S.’s decision to quit. “The six months he spent in prison were very difficult. I think it was enough,” says Van Welsch.
The verdict in the case will take place on Wednesday, October 25.