This note contains stories that can be emotionally impactful.
Eight years ago, Sarah Sands stabbed to death a convicted pedophile.
On an autumn night in 2014, the woman emerged from her east London duplex with a hood over her head and armed with a knife.
He walked up a joint block of flats until he came to an old man’s house.
While there, he stabbed Michael Pleasted eight times, in what was later described as a “predetermined and sustained attack”.
Pleasted bled to death. He was 77 years old.
At the time, the man, who had previously been convicted of pedophilia, was facing further charges. He was accused of sexual offenses against young children in Silvertown, the development where he lived.
Legally, as in all these cases, the names of these children could not be made public during the trial.
But three of them decided to remain anonymous and speak to BBC News. They are the children of Sarah Sands.
They tell their story
The eldest of them, Bradley, who was 12 at the time of the assault, waived his right to anonymity last year to disclose the abuse.
And in an interview with BBC News, his younger brothers, who are twins, Alfie and Reece, have done the same.
They were 11 years old when their mother killed the man accused of abusing them.
Now they are 19 and 20 years old and they remember when, as children, they found out what their mother had done.
They say that growing up with her in prison was difficult.
And while Sarah feels remorseful about the events, her children, for their part, are brutally honest about their mother’s actions.
“I thought it was wrong,” Bradley tells the BBC. “I will not deny it”.
“It made us feel more secure,” Alfie adds.
“It didn’t stop the nightmares. But it gave us a sense of security because you didn’t have to walk down the street thinking you were going to meet him around the corner.”
“He literally lived across the street,” Bradley says.
“I could open that window over there,” he says, pointing, “and I’d see his house.”
Reece, who was 11 when the abuse occurred, says it was “nice to know he was dead.”
But he adds: “It didn’t stop what came next, you know, we often woke up crying [preguntándonos] ‘Where’s mom?'”
Arrival at Silvertown
Sarah Sands and her family moved into their new home, also in Silvertown, months before the murder.
She became friends with Pleasted, who lived alone.
A high-profile figure in the development, he often sat on a bench in front of the kiosk, allowing him to have contact with local residents and their children.
“I thought he was a lovely old man,” he says now.
“She cooked for him, she took care of him, she always kept him company when she had time.”
Pleasted sorted the papers in the shop, and some children worked with him on Saturdays.
“He asked if Brad could help him and he was so excited,” Sands says.
She believes that Pleasted was bullying her eldest son at the same time that he was slowly gaining the trust of the twins. She invited the three children to her house.
One night, the twins revealed to him that while they were in the apartment, Pleasted had sexually assaulted them.
A week later, Bradley revealed the same thing.
The accusation
Pleasted was arrested and charged with crimes against children.
While awaiting trial, the judge released him on bail and said he could return to the development.
Sands says that after the decision she was anguished and that she did not understand anything. She then moved her family into her mother’s small house.
The night of the murder, security cameras caught her going to Pleasted’s apartment.
She says she wanted to ask him to plead guilty to the charges and spare his children the ordeal of going to court.
“I didn’t know what I was doing there,” she says.
“I realized that I had made a big mistake. He was not sorry in any way. He said ‘your children are lying’. The whole world froze to me. I had the knife in my left hand and I remember he tried to grab it.”
The mother indicates that she did not intend to kill Pleasted.
A few hours later, he turned himself in at a police station with the knife and his clothes stained with blood.
During the trial, the judge stated that he did not believe she had “rationally thought about what might happen by carrying the knife with her” but added: “I am sure the possibility of its use was on her mind.”
Sarah Sands was found guilty of manslaughter, rather than murder, on the grounds that she had lost control.
increased penalty
She was jailed for three and a half years, but later saw the sentence increased to seven and a half years because the first ruling was found to have been too lenient.
The Court of Appeal judges said that she had done nothing to help Pleasted, not even calling the emergency services.
He spent almost four years in prison. “I took the law into my own hands,” she says now.
“I was brought up to take responsibility for my actions.”
As a single mother behind bars, the three children and their two younger brothers went to live with their grandmother while she was in prison.
“We lived in one room together. There was no privacy,” Bradley tells the BBC.
A mother from jail
“My grandmother would call my mother at the jail and ask her on the phone if she could go play soccer or go out with my friends. She would often say ‘no’.”
Alfie says that the three brothers “missed things”.
They saw her once a month on her regular visits to the prison. “Sometimes you just want to tell your mom a problem,” she says now.
His friends knew what had happened.
But Bradley says he remembers other people asking, “Where’s your mom? We never see her.”
“They were mad at me,” Sands adds.
“Before I went to jail, we were a very close family and then all of a sudden I wasn’t there anymore. It was horrible for them.”
Asked if she felt any remorse about ending Michael Pleasted’s life, she said: “Yes, totally.”
“I have brought life into this world. It never occurred to me that I would be guilty of taking someone’s life.”
name changes
During the trial it emerged that Pleasted had changed his name from Robin Moult and was a convicted pedophile.
He had 24 prior sex crime convictions over three decades.
His crimes had carried jail terms. But no one in the area, including the town hall that housed him, knew of his past.
Sarah Sands has now joined a group that is campaigning to impose strict measures on sex offenders who change their names.
Labor MP Sarah Champion, who raised the issue with politicians, says some sex offenders are using their new identities to pass the necessary checks on certain jobs.
“Once they’ve changed their names, they can get a new driver’s license and passport with that new identity,” says Sarah Champion.
“That allows them to make their record disappear. And we’re finding that these people then go to schools and other places where there are children and vulnerable people and exploit their positions of trust in the most horrifying ways.”
The easiest solution would be for police to mark offenders’ passports and driving licenses at sentencing, Champion told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
That would mean authorities would be automatically notified if a criminal tried to change their name, and a new assessment of their risk to society could be made, it adds.
A Home Office spokesman said it had already conducted a review of the problem, but could not publish it because it contained sensitive information, which could be used by criminals to exploit the system.
He said the UK had some of the toughest mandates in the world for dealing with community-dwelling sex offenders.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-63729572, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-11-23 20:00:07
june kelly
BBCNews
#mother #killed #man #abused #knife