A “callous” nursery worker has been jailed for 14 years for killing a nine-month-old girl who was strapped face down to a beanbag for more than 90 minutes.
Genevieve Meehan, known to her family as Gigi, suffocated after being placed in “mortal danger” as “punishment” by Kate Roughley, the deputy manager of Tiny Toes nursery in Cheadle Hulme, Stockport.
Roughley, 37, was found guilty of manslaughter after a four-week trial at Manchester crown court.
Sentencing her on Wednesday to 14 years in prison, the judge, Mrs Justice Ellenbogen KC, said Roughley had considered Genevieve “at best a nuisance” and at times with “antipathy”.
“At your hands Genevieve’s parents and grandparents … have lost their sunny, funny little girl,” she added. “By your callous act you have deprived her of the future she would have had and left a void in their lives.”
The trial heard how Genevieve was left for one hour and 37 minutes swaddled in a blanket and strapped face down to a beanbag in the baby room at Tiny Toes on 9 May 2022.
Roughley, who had worked at the nursery for 17 years and ran the baby room, denied manslaughter and an alternative charge of child cruelty, insisting she did not cause the girl’s death.
However, the court heard how Roughley had taken a dislike to Genevieve and behaved antagonistically towards her in the days before her death.
The room leader had told her “stop your whingeing” and said: “Genevieve, if we had any chance of being friends, you just blew it,” later adding: “You are driving me bananas.”
In CCTV footage on the day Genevieve died, Roughley could be seen picking the girl out of her cot and placing her impatiently on a play mat, muttering “vile” and “Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes.”
Within an hour, Roughley was seen clapping and singing: “Oh Genevieve. Genevieve go home, Genevieve go home, go home Genevieve,” as the child cried on a play mat.
In a victim impact statement read to court, Genevieve’s mother, Katie Meehan, said she felt “dead inside” and consumed by guilt that she left her daughter in Roughley’s care.
“My love for Genevieve cannot be put into words. I find that since she was so cruelly taken from me that words are simply inadequate. Nothing can reflect the horror of her death or the life that I now live,” she said in a statement read by the prosecutor, Martin Reid KC.
As she cried in the public gallery, Meehan said the image of her daughter surrounded in hospital by “more doctors than I have ever seen before” was seared in her memory. “It was utterly horrific and I am stuck in that moment in the hospital looking at my dead baby every day.”
Roughley stared at the floor expressionless in the court dock as the victim impact statements were read.
Greater Manchester police on Tuesday charged a second former Tiny Toes employee with four counts of child neglect.
Rebecca Gregory, 25, was charged with offences dating back to April 2022 and not connected to Genevieve’s death. She is due before Stockport magistrates court on 5 August to enter a plea.
