A 30-year-old woman, Deveca Rose has been handed a 10-year jail term after her four sons died in a house fire after she locked them inside to go shopping at Sainsbury’s.
Rose left her two sets of twins alone in the unsafe terraced house in Sutton, south-west London when the huge blaze broke out on the evening of December 16, 2021.
Leyton and Logan Hoath, aged three, and four-year-olds Kyson and Bryson Hoath screamed out for help, and a neighbour desperately tried to break down the front door.
Rose, who had split up with her partner and suffered from mental health problems, was found guilty of four counts of manslaughter.
Judge Mark Lucraft KC said: “There are no words to describe this case other than a deeply tragic one.”
The children’s father, Dalton Hoath, said losing his four sons was “the worst day of my life”.
Mr Hoath, who had split up with the defendant, added that he was “devastated” and his world had been turned “upside down” by the loss of his “young, boisterous lads”.
In a statement read by a relative on his behalf, he said: “Their lives had just begun but were cut so short. It was every parent’s worst nightmare.
“I’m not a great talker but even if I was I could not put it in words. I simply want to join them.
“I will never recover from losing my funny, beautiful boys. I have to fight for all of us left behind and live with this massive pain in my heart before I meet them again.”
Great-grandmother Sally Johnson wept in court and she told of the “horror” and “pain” of her loss.
She said: “The thought of them crying and screaming out will haunt me forever. My only comfort is they are now together forever and need never be alone again. I’m afraid I will never be able to forgive.”
The judge noted Rose had already been to Sainsbury’s earlier that day and her return trip at the time of the fire was not to purchase any items that were essential or vital.
He told Rose: “You were not there and the children were too young to know what to do. As a result of what you did, they were all k!lled.”
The Old Bailey heard Rose and the children had been living in squalor, surrounded by rubbish and human excrement before the boy’s de@ths.
There were no working toilets in the house, and buckets throughout the property were used instead.
The children had not attended school for three weeks before their de@ths.
Prosecutor Kate Lumsdon KC had told the court: “There was rubbish thickly spread throughout the house. The toilet and the bath were full of rubbish and could not be used. Buckets and pots were used as toilets instead.”
When she arrived back at the property to the scene of the fire, she told firefighters she left her children in the care of a friend named Jade.
This prompted firefighters to go back into the house to search for her.
But police concluded she either did not exist or had not been at the house that day.
