Child (7) killed mother who tried to strangle him

WHEN seven-year-old Kevin woke up at 8 a.m. on January 13th, his mother Suzanna was sitting next to him. "You won't go to school today," she told him. "I'm taking you to paradise to see uncle." Then she tried to smother him with a pillow.

According to Kevin, he flailed about, screaming: "I don't want to go to heaven!" Suzanna then tried to strangle him with a scarf. Kevin broke free and ran to the kitchen, where mother and child wrestled on the floor. The boy grabbed a knife from the edge of the dishwasher and cut his mother's face several times while she was still trying to strangle her son with the scarf. Kevin realised the knife "didn't cut enough" and reached a sharper knife, which he used to stab his mother three times near the heart.

The boy telephoned his father Pascal, an electricity company employee, who rushed home to find his wife dying on the kitchen floor. He called an ambulance, but she died before help arrived. Kevin was taken to Evry hospital, with strangulation marks around his neck. Despite his small size, the coroner concluded that Kevin had inflicted the lethal stab wounds.

Judges debated for two days whether Kevin could be held responsible for his mother's murder. French law forbids trying children under 13, but it does allow legal action if the child is deemed to have been conscious of his actions. The court decided that Kevin killed his mother in self defence - unprecedented in French judicial history.

Suzanna (40) met her French husband in her native Peru. She had never harmed their son before. But in recent weeks she sank into severe depression after her brother's death from cancer. Police and psychiatrists concluded she wanted to commit suicide but couldn't bear the idea of leaving her child.