A mother has been charged with four counts of manslaughter after the deaths of her four sons in a fire in south London, the Metropolitan police have said.
Deveca Rose, 29, was charged on Thursday with manslaughter, contrary to common law, and child abandonment contrary to the Children and Young Persons Act 1933.
She will appear at Croydon magistrates court on Monday.
Her two sets of twin brothers – Leyton and Logan Hoath, aged three, and Kyson and Bryson Hoath, aged four – died after the fire in Collingwood Road, Sutton, at about 7pm on 16 December 2021.
They were treated at the scene before being taken to two south London hospitals where they were pronounced dead.
About 60 firefighters reached the scene in under three minutes and tried to rescue the children, who were given CPR and taken to hospital, where they died.
Speaking after the incident, the father of the four boys said the family was “utterly devastated”.
Dalton Hoath, 28, described the four brothers as “bright, caring, lovable boys”.
The boys’ grandfather Jason Hoath, a security officer at AFC Wimbledon, a League Two football club, had described how the incident was “all the more heartbreaking” because the boys’ Christmas presents were “piled under the tree, ready”.
On the Saturday after the incident, a minute’s silence to remember the boys was observed before Sutton United’s League Two match with Harrogate Town. Matt Gray, the manager of Sutton United football club, had laid yellow-and-black team scarves outside the police cordon that had been in place at the scene.
Two of the boys were pupils at Westbourne primary school in Sutton, which said in a statement that its entire community was “devastated at the news of the tragic loss of the four children”.
