A woman who abandoned four kids in a filthy, rubbish strewn house to go to Germany to meet up with her new boyfriend was handed a one year sentence on Friday.
Sentencing Mariyana Asenova at Craigavon Crown Court, Judge Donna McColgan KC told the 31-year-old she would have to serve half her sentence in jail and the rest on licence conditions but with time spent on remand “I think you gave about a month still to serve.”
At an earlier hearing Asenova, listed as “current address unknown,” entered guilty pleas to eight charges of being cruel to a child under 16, all committed on 14 April 2022.
In her sentencing remarks, Judge McColgan said four of the charges related to abandonment of the four victims and four amounted to neglect of the children who at the time were 10, nine, five and just a year old.
The judge told the court the offences arose when early that morning Asenova left the house in Lurgan claiming she had a hospital appoint and would be back.
“However police understand that she was in fact driven to Dublin airport by a neighbour at 7.15am…and social services believe that the defendant flew to Germany to be with her new boyfriend,” Judge McColgan told the court.
Asenova had apparently left £100 in the house, “money she owed her husband” but with “little to no food and no nappies” fir the youngest toddler, the oldest child took that money to the shop to buy food and nappies before she contacted a relative.
That sparked police and social services action and in total, the children were effectively left alone for around three hours but as Judge McColgan highlighted “that of course would not have been known by the defendant.”
With the children taken into care the police looked around the house the following day and the judge described how “the house was filthy, there was a strong odour, the floors were sticky, there were no floor boards, there was rubbish all over.”
She added there was also “little to no food, the bedrooms were filled with rubbish and only the defendant’s bed had sheets” while the victims slept in one bed with neither sheets nor covers on it.
Asenova was contacted and she claimed she would return to NI but she failed to keep that promise and eventually, an international arrest warrant and extradition proceedings forced her back to face the court.
Judge McColgan said while there were aggravating features including the “very young ages” of the children there was mitigation to be found in the submissions of defence counsel Patrick Taylor in that Asenova had clear record, had admitted her guilty and “she feels shame and remorse.”
The judge told Asenova if she had taken the case to trial and been convicted the sentence would have been 18 months but allowing credit for the guilty pleas, “i’m prepared to reduce that to 12 months.”
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