A two-year-old who was beaten to death by her uncaring mother’s partner.
Isabella Jonas-Wheildon was subjected to escalating brutality by Scott Jeff including slaps, kicks and cold showers as he tried to potty train her, while her mother Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell ‘stood back and did nothing’.
When the toddler finally died of appalling injuries, the callous pair wheeled her around in a pushchair for three days, visiting pubs and shops and dumping plastic bags on her body.
The pair – who are now serving long jail terms – regularly moved to different parts of East Anglia as they slept in temporary accommodation and camped in a tent, while coming to the attention of police, housing authorities and other organisations.
A safeguarding practice review has now concluded that those they came into contact with missed opportunities to help Isabella as they operated in ‘silos’.
Report author Dr Russell Wate said: ‘Isabella’s voice or her lived experience was not seen at all during the last month of her life and not demonstrated in professionals’ actions.’
Information was gathered but not shared and ‘no multi-agency discussions took place’, with Isabella effectively ‘invisible’ to the authorities before her death in June 2023.
Gleason-Mitchell quit her job as a nursery worker in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, after rekindling a relationship with violent Jeff and believing she was going to be placed in emergency accommodation in Northampton.
When that failed to materialise, the pair, both 24, moved to the Norfolk coast where they were found sleeping rough in a tent in Great Yarmouth by a police officer following calls from the public and a ‘concerned citizen’ arranged temporary accommodation.
Isabella’s maternal grandmother had also contacted Hertfordshire Police to report her daughter and granddaughter were missing but she was told to contact Bedfordshire Police. No further action was taken.
Gleason-Mitchell’s increasingly concerned family travelled to Great Yarmouth and went to the local police station but ‘felt that help wasn’t forthcoming’, the report revealed.
