31-year-old woman gets 3 years in prison for abusing her grandparents: “She locked us in a storage room after we gave her a house” (Alken)

A 31-year-old woman from Alken has been sentenced to 3 years in prison for the inhuman treatment of her grandmother (79) and step-grandfather (81). Her partner (39) is also guilty and gets 4 years in prison. The grandmother testified how she was locked in the garage storage room with her husband after she donated her home to her granddaughter.

Granddaughter T. (31) moved in with her elderly grandmother (79) and step-grandfather (81) in Alken in November 2018. She took care of the couple. Her 39-year-old boyfriend C. also regularly came by to help in the garden. When the elderly couple decided to donate their Alken home to their granddaughter as a thank you for their care, things went wrong.

Lost 40 kilos

According to the grandmother, she and her husband were banished to a storage room in the garage. According to the grandmother, there was no bed and the elderly people were barely given food and drink. “I lost forty kilos because I lived on rusks and jam,” the woman said before the Tongeren judge in March. The sanitary facilities and bathroom of the house were also no longer available to the grandparents, she said. “I had to put torn sheets in my pants as a diaper.”

The elderly people did not have a telephone and the couple’s regular doctor was thanked and dismissed after forty years. “C. had threatened me. If I said something to someone, he would put me in a wheelchair,” he concluded. Meanwhile, the young couple also took money from the grandparents’ accounts.

On February 25, 2020, the grandmother was left alone after her husband was hospitalized following a fall. He then went straight to a residential care center. The grandmother eventually managed to escape on the night of August 19, 2020 by climbing out the window and ringing the neighbors’ doorbell.

Prison sentences

The Tongeren judge sentenced the 31-year-old granddaughter to a prison sentence of three years. Her boyfriend gets four years in prison. The judge requalified some charges with the aggravating circumstance that the victims were in a vulnerable condition given their advanced age.