Serious Case Review Into The Death Of Jamie Kightley

19 February 2014, 16:00

A serious case review into the death of an eight-week-old baby in Northampton has found no agency could have prevented it.

On the morning of 17th March 2012 an ambulance was called to Jamie Kightley's home address in Northampton.

His parents, Jacqueline Parker and Adam Kightley, claimed they found Jamie cold and unresponsive in his cot.

Attempts to resuscitate the eight week old were made by paramedics but he was pronounced dead shortly after.

His body was taken to Northampton General Hospital where X-rays and a post mortem found he died from a serious head injury.

He also had injuries to his abdomen, back and limbs.

At this point there was a break down in communication between the paediatrician and the police meaning it took four days for Parker, aged 21, and Kightley, aged 24, to be arrested.

Kevin Crompton from the Northampton Safeguarding Children board says if the couple had other children they would have been at risk at this time.

Mr Crompton says he's confident steps have now been put in place to make sure this delay doesn't happen again.

Both Parker and Kightley have since been found to have had a 'troubled' childhoods however even if this had been known about by all agencies it still wouldn't have been thought worthy of any serious intervention.

Kightley had been convicted for committing crimes including burglary and assaulting a former girlfriend. He'd spent some time in prison.

Police were also called to the house during the eight weeks of Jamie's life to arrest Kightley for drug offences relating to the use of cannabis- police did check Jamie during this visit and reported there was no concern for his welfare.

Jamie was visited by a student health worker who also had no concern for him.

Kevin Crompton say:

"They were a young couple that did not trigger any concern amongst the health professionals that worked with them so its difficult to point to any specific thing that we could have done and the report concludes that there’s nothing anyone could have done to prevent or predict Jamie's death.

"Nether the less there are some issues, one is had professionals looked more closely into the backgrounds both of mother and particularly the father it might have alerted them to some risks but that would have triggered a fairly low level intervention where we would have probably tried to provide more support to them as parents.

"There’s some issues about deployment of student health visitors, there’s some issues about the number of health visitors we've got that we'd like to see change but sadly I cant point to anything that I believe would have changed the outcome here"