A MAN who cared for his grandmother at the home he used as a cannabis farm allowed her to die in squalor and filth.

Robert Daniels failed to call an ambulance for “frail and vulnerable” 88-year-old June Cox on the night before she died, even though he recognised she was seriously ill, Bradford Crown Court heard.

He had cared for her for a number of years at his rented farmhouse home, Ryecroft Barn, in Ryecroft Road, Glusburn, near Keighley, but admitted neglecting her in the last eight weeks of her life. Prosecutor Richard Wright QC said Daniels, 37, had an obligation to care for his grandmother in her extreme old age.

Mr Wright said she required extensive care and ought to have been in regular contact with medical professionals, but had not seen a doctor since April 2015.

On January 22 last year, the defendant went to the home of a neighbour and told her he thought his grandmother was dead. The neighbour called 999 and police found Mrs Cox dead on a camp bed, covered with a sleeping bag in a ground floor room. The sleeping bag was soaked in urine and the thin mattress, covered in bin liners, was filthy with urine and faeces. The dead woman’s body and clothing were also filthy and extensively soiled and she had extensive inflammation and ulceration. She was badly malnourished and weighed just three and a half stones.

The defendant confirmed he had made no attempt to access a doctor in the days leading up to her death, even though he believed her to be showing signs of approaching the end of her life. She died from a chest infection.

Mr Wright told Judge Penelope Belcher, Daniels had allowed her condition to deteriorate to the extent that she died in a cold and filthy camp bed. He said at least part of the motivation for refusing access to family and medical professionals may have been the fact that the property was given over for the cultivation of controlled drugs.

The court heard officers who attended found the first floor of the property was used for the commercial cultivation of cannabis. Daniels was jailed for three years and four months last July after pleading guilty to producing and being concerned in the supply of cannabis and money laundering. His total benefit from his five-year enterprise was £250,000. Daniels, who pleaded guilty to neglect, told the judge he had left it too late to take his grandmother to hospital and would have to live with that for the rest of his life.

Judge Belcher sentenced him to nine months imprisonment, consecutive to his drugs sentence. She said he should have called an ambulance the night before the death.

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