A drug addict who beat and neglected a 2- year-old boy was jailed Thursday for 10 years by a court in Bremen, two years after the boy's broken body was found in a refrigerator, according to dpa. Kevin, as he was named in the German media, was born into a world without kindness. His drug-addict mother lived with the defendant, 43, who took heroin, until she died in mysterious circumstances. Though he was a ward of the state, police and welfare officials did not arrive to take him to an orphanage for another 11 months. In October 2006, they found his battered, thin little body in the refrigerator, wrapped in blankets and bin-liner bags. The defendant was convicted of fatal assault and mistreatment of a person counting on his protection. Judges ordered him to begin his prison term in a detoxification centre to break his drug habit. The court in Bremen on Germany's North Sea coast ruled that the prosecution had not proved murder. Pathologists noted about two dozen fractures in Kevin's skeleton and said the boy had probably died seven months earlier. Two welfare officials are to go on trial next, accused of homicide by neglecting their duty of care to Kevin. The case was one of the nastiest of a series of infanticides and child-starvation cases over the past few years in Germany. In another homicide verdict Thursday, a mother was given seven years jail for dashing her baby, 7 weeks, to the floor in a rage. dpa
