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MEAWW.COM / NEWS / CRIME & JUSTICE

Care worker who neglected disabled and obese woman leading to her death by starvation sentenced to three years

Tracey Burrows was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter in the death of Julie Cleworth and was ordered to spend three years behind bars.
UPDATED APR 8, 2020
(Police Department)
(Police Department)

A British care worker who let a severely disabled woman starve to death, by neglectting to check up on her at her house, has been sentenced to three years in prison.

Mother-of-three Tracey Burrows, 56, was arrested in connection to the February 2017 death of Julie Cleworth, a 43-year-old woman who was found dead in her Merseyside home four days after she allegedly lied about checking up on her to her bosses, according to the Mirror.

During her nine-day trial at the Liverpool Crown Court last month, the jury heard how it had been mistakenly believed that Cleworth, who was described as "helpless as a baby" and was so morbidly obese she needed assistance to move, had been returned to the hospital after a three-day stay at her St Helen's home because ambulance staff found that her electronic bed was not working.

The staff told the hospital that they would have to return her if her bed could not be fixed, following which that information was passed on to Unite Healthcare Ltd, the care company for which Burrows worked. However, in the meantime, a crew member had fixed the bed. They then put Cleworth on it so she could wait for Burrows' visit as they did not have the equipment to place her in the lounge.

The jury was told that around 7 pm that evening, February 5, 2017, Burrows, one of Cleworth's regular caretakers, turned up to her home but didn't even get out of her car to check on the 43-year-old because the residence was in darkness.

Instead, she used the 30 minutes allotted for the visit to go to the home of her elderly mother, who lived nearby. She returned to Cleworth's home later at the suggestion of a trainee colleague but once again did not bother getting out of her car.

Deborah Gould, prosecuting, described to the court how Cleworth, who stood 5'1'' tall and weighed 252 pounds, was so morbidly obese that if something was not within the reach of her fingers, "it may as well have been 1,000 miles away."

However, in the days leading up to her death, she had desperately tried to reach for food, with her half-naked body found partially sprawled over the bed she had tried to get out of it. A post mortem examination found that Cleworth had developed ketoacidosis in which toxins build up in the bloodstream as a result of starvation. An expert told the court that she had survived for a minimum of 24-48 hours and would have suffered various symptoms including pain and confusion before lapsing into a coma.

Last month, Burrows, who maintained her innocence, was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter in Cleworth's death by the jury after just three hours of deliberation.

Handing down her sentence this week, Judge Neil Flewitt told Burrows that one could only "imagine the terror which must have overcome Julie Cleworth as she lay helpless in bed, realizing that she had been abandoned and left to starve to death."

"There are many thousands of people throughout the country who rely on care workers to satisfy their basic needs," he told the 56-year-old. "Every day those people and their families trust those care workers to carry out their duties with diligence and compassion."

"Julie Cleworth was one of those people and on February 5, 2017, you neglected her in a way which the jury decided was truly exceptionally bad and which led to her death... if I deal with this case in any way other than by the imposition of an immediate prison sentence I would be letting down Julie Cleworth and her family and I should be failing in my duty to protect the many thousands of other people in a similar situation."

Speaking after the verdict, Cleworth's mother Hilary Kenny said, "I’m really glad that she will serve time but it will not bring my daughter back and I miss her.”

She announced that she was planning to file a lawsuit against Unite Healthcare Ltd.

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