A DETECTIVE told an inquest of his shock at the conditions he found in a bedroom where a toddler died with her head wedged in a cot.

Nine-month-old Delicia Adora Mae Fenton was found dead in her cot, with her head wedged between the rails and an undersize mattress.

The tragic toddler had been put to bed at 6.30pm the previous night and it was 11.05am the following day before her mother, Susan Rushton, of Whalley Road, Altham West, made the grim discovery.

An experienced police officer told the inquest he was shocked when he went upstairs and found Mrs Rushton's two-year-old son in a wooden cot with no mattress. He said there was human faeces on the carpet around the cot and on other items in the room and there was a strong smell of excrement.

"I was shocked that a child could be kept in such conditions," said Detective Constable Nigel Watson.

Mrs Rushton had earlier told how she had put Delicia to bed after her tea. She put the child in a carry cot which was placed inside a cot. She said the child had previously got her legs caught through the cot bars and this had distressed her.

After getting two-year-old Lawrence to sleep Mrs Rushton went downstairs where she said she had two glasses of vodka and coke and a can of lager with her boyfriend, Tony Coid, while they waited for her friend and former sister in law, Christine Fenton, to come home. The next day everyone overslept and Mr Coid was late going to work. After getting her eldest son off to school, Mrs Rushton started some home sewing, for which she was paid.

She told how there was a leak in the kitchen and she mended this and was mopping the floor when she heard Lawrence screaming and ran upstairs. Delicia was face down at the bottom of the cot with her head trapped between the mattress and the cot bars.

Paul Fenton, the child's father, said he could not understand how someone could put a baby to bed at 6.30pm and not check on it again before 11am the next day. He also said he believed there was more alcohol consumed than Mrs Rushton said but this was denied by her and Mr Coid, of Langdale Road, Padiham.

He said that Mr Fenton's allegation that there had been a bag of white powder in the house was "preposterous."

Mrs Christine Fenton, of Winfield Street, Clayton-le-Moors, who had been married to Paul Fenton's brother, slept in an attic bedroom at the house. She told how the evening before Delicia had taken her first steps.

Mr Fenton asked if Mrs Fenton thought it was right for Mrs Rushton to go out four or five times a week and leave the baby in the care of a 15-year-old boy. Mrs Fenton described the boy as "responsible" and "good" with Delicia and Lawrence. Dr Melanie Newbold, consultant paediatric pathologist at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, said there were indents on the child's head as though she had been wedged between some objects at the time of her death. She gave the probable cause of death as positional asphyxia.

Asked if she had anything to say before the verdict was given, Mrs Rushton said: "I loved her, I really did. It sounds so awful listening to all this, it sounds worse than it really was.

"I thought a lot of her and I was part of her. I know who loved her."

Recording a verdict of accidental death, coroner Michael Singleton said he was satisfied that Delicia had become trapped between the mattress and the side of the cot.

"It is difficult to imagine a set of circumstances more tragic than these," said Mr Singleton.

"That this young girl, some nine months old, should die in these circumstances is beyond words."

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