Parents lived with decomposing body of dead 7-year-old son for a month’

Parents who lived with the dead body of their seven-year-old son for over a month have been charged with negligent homicide.

Bruce Hopkins, 39, said he had tried to give his son Caleb ‘alternative treatments’ because he and his wife did not believe in standard medicine.
Court hears how boy was left to rot beneath blankets as parents refused to accept his death and used ‘alternative treatments’ when he fell ill.

Prosecuting lawyer Enrique Barata told the court: “The father explained he tried to give his son resuscitating manoeuvres, cardiac massage and mouth-to-mouth breathing but the child was unresponsive.”

He added that the Christian parents had “lost their sense of reality” although medical tests suggested that they were not mentally ill. Mr Hopkins and his wife Schrell, 38, lived with their dead son and two other children, 12 and 14, in a rented flat in Girona, Spain where he worked nearby as an engineer.

The two living children are now being cared for by local authorities and their parents – originally from Detroit, USA – have been released from police custody but their passports have been confiscated.

Mr Barata said the exact time and cause of Caleb’s death, who was asthmatic, is not yet known but police believe it to be at least a month.

They discovered his body when visiting the flat after being alerted by the landlord who had come round earlier to collect four months’ worth of unpaid rent.

Smelling a foul odour, cops searched the apartment and found the corpse wrapped in several blankets but without obvious injuries.

Mr Barata said: “They would live normal home life around the dead body ¿ They couldn't accept that the child was dead.”

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