Published: Just now
The family home parents who were sued for manslaughter after the death of a 15-year-old girl in a separate prosecution are acquitted by the Lund district court. The charge of grossly causing the death of another is also dismissed due to the statute of limitations.
“It has not been proven that the course of the girl’s illness was other than what normally follows from glandular fever and what the foster parents were told about the illness. There is no investigation that shows that the foster home parents understood that there was a serious risk that the girl could die if she did not receive care,” says the lawyer Björn Hansson in a press release.
The demand for damages to the estate and the biological parents is also rejected.
The case is unusual, as it is the teenage girl’s biological mother, not a prosecutor, who sued the foster parents. Through her lawyer Monica Crusner, she has claimed that they were guilty of murder, alternatively grossly causing the death of another, because the girl did not receive the right care when she fell ill.
In April eleven years ago, she was found dead in her bed in the family home after a short illness. At first she appeared to have come down with a common cold, but at a doctor’s visit a diagnosis of glandular fever was made and she was told to rest.
There were no more doctor visits before she was found dead 18 days later. The forensic examination showed that acute pneumonia was the probable cause of death and that this in turn was a consequence of an unusual disease, Lemierre’s syndrome.
After the death, prosecutors have assessed in several rounds that no crime that falls under general prosecution had been committed and therefore no preliminary investigation was ever initiated.