You Just Can’t Save People From Themselves!

Much furore about the Kiena Dawes case, and most of the approbium falling on the police who 'failed to save her'.

During a six-week trial, Preston Crown Court heard how the hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting body-builder went from professing undying love to his girlfriend to physically and mentally breaking her. He punched and kicked Kiena, tried to drown her by holding her head in a baby bath and threatened to 'drill her teeth out'.

Did this come out of the blue? Was there no clue that he was a wrong ‘un? 

In 2019 he attacked his then-partner, Kayleigh Anderson, following a two-day coke and booze session with an uncle.

Didn't think so! Why, then, did she shack up with him? He was a friend of her brother - did her brother not warn her?

In the 12 months before she killed herself, she called police no less than five times either to report that she had been assaulted or give details of the domestic abuse she had suffered. On four of the occasions, she was visited by officers at her home. Twice she had visible injuries, including a black eye when she was six months pregnant.

And the police did their best, within the laws, but…. 

But Kiena was so scared of Wellings that it was only when he brutally assaulted her in front of their baby, 11 days before she died, that she finally backed efforts to prosecute him.

*sighs* 

Even then, police failed to support her as they might have, granting Wellings bail and then failing to lock him up when he apparently breached his bail conditions.'I was in hospital longer than he was in the cells,' she would write in a message shortly before she killed herself.

They can only withhold bail under certain circumstances, thanks to the crisis in our prisons - they don’t make that law, they just carry it out. 

Wellings was not charged until June last year but when he was the charges not only included assault and controlling and coercive behaviour but manslaughter as well, for which he has been cleared.

By the jury, and I suspect the police involved were as furious about that as everyone else... 

Following Kiena's death, Lancashire Constabulary referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) over its handling of the case and the contact they had with her. The police watchdog later announced that it found one officer had a case to answer for gross misconduct and two officers had a case to answer for misconduct relating to actions or omissions connected to the victim's reports of domestic abuse.

I wouldn't consider that any sort of victory, as the bar is so low on these things.