Dad refused to hand Lucy Letby dying son after nurse injected baby with air

The parents of a tiny baby murdered by twisted Lucy Letby told how the nurse tried to "savour their son's dying moments for herself". In a tearful testimony at evil Letby's public inquiry today, Monday, September 16, the mum and dad of her third victim, Child C, described how they cradled their dying little boy after realising he could not be saved.

Desperate medics at the Countess of Chester Hospital had tried for almost an hour to resuscitate the infant, who suddenly deteriorated after Letby injected air into his stomach in June 2015.

As they endured a five-hour ordeal waiting for his suffering to end and saying their goodbyes, Letby arrived on the scene with a cold cot - used to preserve dead infants so their grieving parents can spend more time with them.

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In a statement provided to the Thirlwall Inquiry, the dad of Child C said he vividly remembered Letby prompting him to put his son in the cold cot before curtly snapping back at her: "He's not dead yet".

He said: "Reflecting on it now, I think she [Letby] was trying to savour my son’s dying moments for herself, which fills me with both emotion and anger. Had I not challenged her she would have further intruded on our private goodbye."

Child C's mum added: "It's horrendous, knowing what we know now. It took us aback at the time because it didn't fit with the circumstances of what was happening - we were having this private and very difficult moment that went on for several hours.

"My concern now is she wanted us to leave him there, which doesn't really bear thinking about. It adds an extra horror to what we have to think about."

Despite not being Child C's designated nurse, Letby ignored orders from hospital bosses to look after other babies and instead made sure she was involved in his family's bereavement care, the inquiry heard.

Child C's mum told how cold-blooded Letby constructed a memory box with a lock of Child C's hair, moulds of his hands and feet, a dummy and water from his baptism.

She told the inquiry: "I haven't got any physical memories of my son that were not packed in the box by Lucy Letby."

The mum then broke down as she explained how she never got the chance to dress her own son in his tiny outfits.

Stifling sobs, she recalled a telephone conversation with the bereavement team at Alder Hey where they told her Child C "looked beautiful" in the clothes he had been dressed in.

She wept: "I found this comment particularly difficult because in his life he had never been dressed and never been dressed by me, and if anyone was going to dress him, it should have been me as his mother."

After their son's death the family had to endure a painstaking battle for the truth as details of more baby deaths on the unit started to emerge.

Child C's mum described her fight to get a copy of the shocking report by the Royal College of Paediatric Health, which was the first public acknowledgement of higher neonatal death rates at the Countess of Chester.

The mum slammed the hospital's former medical director, Ian Harvey for his attempts to brush grieving parents away with a "white washed and glossed over" version of the report. She explained how hospital bosses had failed to disclose the nature of a police probe into the unit.

She said: "We thought they were just ruling out foul play. To not inform us until someone has been arrested on suspicion of murdering is unforgivable.

"As a family we have endured years of anxiety and stress from the initial arrest of Lucy Letby to her conviction. The events of that night and everything that has happened since have left an indelible mark upon us, one that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

"Returning to our everyday lives post trial has proven more difficult than expected. Despite the support we received during the criminal trial, the knowledge we gained about the events leading up to our son's murder and the methods that were used by Letby has been indescribably traumatising.

"I have been truly horrified as we have learned more and more detail about the extent of information that was withheld from us by the management at the Countess of Chester.

"To find out now that at the time Ian Harvey met with us in February 2017 he was well aware of both the concerns about Letby and that the report about our son's death did contain criticism, is an absolute disgrace. I cannot understand this from the perspective of a medic or any human level whatsoever, we continue to feel thoroughly betrayed."

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