Mother obsessed with computer game ignored children and let two dogs starve to death

[teko]

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/840709-mother-obsessed-with-computer-game-ignored-children-and-let-two-dogs-starve-to-death

9/12/2010

The 33-year-old played the game on the internet almost non-stop while her children were forced to drink cold baked beans from the tin because there were no spoons.


Her German shepherd and lurcher dogs lay rotting in the dining room for two months.


‘Police discovered the bodies of the dogs. Flies were around them. The smell was so overpowering, making the officers wretch,’ prosecutor Deepak Kapur told a court.


The woman was a devoted and competent mother until her husband’s death from a heart attack, Maidstone Crown Court heard.


But, after being invited to play by a Facebook friend, she became obsessed with the game.


By August 2009 she was playing almost non-stop, getting just two hours sleep a day.


For six months, her children, aged nine, ten and 13, were badly neglected, being given no hot food to eat. A neighbour in Swanley, Kent, peered through the letter box and called police after seeing the ‘appalling conditions’.


Allan Compton, defending, said the woman, who admitted child cruelty and animal neglect, ‘retreated into this virtual world prov­ided by her laptop’. The house has now been cleaned up and her children taken into care.


She was given a six-month jail term, suspended for two years, ordered to do 75 hours of unpaid work and was banned from keeping animals or using computers.


Judge Jeremy Carey told her the internet ban was ‘to assist you to resist the temptation to return to this virtual world’.

[Trinity4]

I've been on MH since October 2007.  I have a little over 3700 posts and in my opinion I've spent more time than I should have posting but that's 3 years of history.  I don't do facebook (although I am a member) or any other forum.  
There are some who have that many posts on MH and have only been a member for six months.  I can't imagine the need to have to connect with people that often but I guess whatever floats your boat even though I think it's an addiction.    

Trinity

[nygirl7]

Lack of self restraint to this point is just plain wrong! "

I totally agree.  to some being on the internet and posting on facebook and forums and stuff is obession.

I think it's probably real mental illness - nobody could just want to be on the internet that long that much to post 1000s of random thoughts while their dogs died and their children almost died without it being so.

When you look at postinig patterns of people on the internet it makes you go hummmmmmm.  I posts during the workday on a few forums but you don't see hundreds of posts started by me with me following up bumping them up all day.  I think that is an obsession and that is how something this tragic could have happened to this family.

One can only hope they all get help.

[narla]

I'm like you I'm not working and I don't have young children,On a Tuesday when my grandson is here I don't get on the computer at all,I prefer to spend time with him he's more entertaining.I couldn't get on when he's here anyway he'd be into everything. LOL

[teko]

Lack of self restraint to this point is just plain wrong! Sometimes when I go on different sites and see the same people hour after hour, I find myself wondering what else they do in a day. I have no work right now and am bored and am on way to much myself, but I dont have children either and manage to get what I need done. Sometimes I go to facebook and find the same people on telling every movement of their day and they have kids, young ones at that. I dont know where they find the time without neglecting. I think this is more widespread than we would like to think.

[narla]

WOW!! That's obsessive