It is a scene of domestic mayhem you might see at any family home in middle England. With the school day over, five-year-old Dylan can’t wait to chase his little sister Mia through their Victorian terraced family home. As the children shriek uproariously, their parents, Jill and Iain Kelly, laugh indulgently at their antics. Yet behind the laughter and the smiles lies a heartbreaking confession. For the truth is that had Jill and Iain understood how desperately ill their little boy would be, they would have opted for a course of action that many still find unthinkable. They would have terminated the pregnancy. ‘I love my son. He’s changed our lives,’ Jill says. ‘But if I’d known everything that Dylan would have to go through, and will have to go through, there’s no doubt in my mind that, given the correct information, I would have asked for a termination.

A judgment filed today with the Clark County Superior Court outlines a record-setting settlement reached between the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) and five siblings who were beaten and starved for nearly a decade inside their Vancouver home at the hands of their parents. The state of Washington will pay the children a total of $9.75 million to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of the children in 2013. The suit alleged that DSHS social workers and their supervisors did not follow state policy or law when they received dozens of warnings that the children (now between the ages of 13 and 19) were in harm’s way.

A mother from Pennsylvania has been charged with assault and child endangerment after police say she forced her adopted teenage daughter to eat used cat litter and toothpaste, and started to sew her mouth shut with a needle. Rana Cooper, 46, was arrested this week for what police are calling excessive punishment and neglect that also included forcing her 16-year-old daughter to scrape the inside of a toilet and eat what was on her finger. According to police, the teen had to earn enough points for cleaning the house just so she could eat or use the bathroom.

WATSONVILLE — Two people were killed and one person was injured in a Watsonville restaurant shooting Friday night. A 4-year-old girl and a 34-year-old man died in the shooting at the Fish House Bar and Grill at 972 Main St. Watsonville police and officers of the Santa Cruz County Gang Task Force responded to the restaurant at 11:55 p.m. after receiving multiple reports of people fighting. When officers arrived, they heard a number of gunshots and noticed several people running from the scene.

PARLIN, N.J. – Seven students were charged with sex crimes Friday after an investigation into hazing on a high school football team found that they held other children against their will and improperly touched them, prosecutors said. Three of the students were charged with aggravated sexual assault, criminal restraint, hazing and other crimes for an act of sexual penetration upon one of the children, Middlesex County prosecutor Andrew C. Carey said. The four other students were charged with aggravated criminal sexual contact and other crimes for what happened at Sayreville War Memorial High School, a regional football power whose season was canceled amid the investigation.

HARDWICK, Vermont – New developments in the death of a disabled Hardwick teenager. The case is now being called a homicide and two people are in custody. The child’s mother and her boyfriend are now facing second-degree murder charges. The couple is accused of putting alcohol in the boy’s IV. Police say on Aug. 22 they were called to the Hardwick home of Melissa Robitille and Walter Richters. First responders say they found 13-year-old Isaac Robitille dead inside. The boy had significant medical conditions, including multiple physical handicaps that required the assistance of caretakers, feeding tubes and IVs to keep him alive. The child’s autopsy revealed he had a BAC of 0.146, almost twice the legal limit for an adult to drive.

A man accused of ‘marrying’ and having a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old girl has pleaded guilty to ongoing child sex abuse. The 27-year-old Lebanese student, who can’t be named, pleaded guilty in Burwood Local Court on Thursday to one count of persistent sexual abuse of a child, which carries a 25-year maximum jail sentence. The charge takes in 25 counts of sexual intercourse with a child between 10 and 14, with which the man was originally charged.

The Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) was authorized in the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which was signed into law on July 27, 2006. The responsibilities of the SMART Office include providing jurisdictions with guidance regarding the implementation of the Adam Walsh Act, and providing technical assistance to the states, territories, Indian tribes, local governments, and to public and private organizations. The SMART Office also tracks important legislative and legal developments related to sex offenders and administers grant programs related to the registration, notification, and management of sex offenders.

GUILDERLAND, New York — The four people found slain inside their suburban upstate New York home were two adults and two boys, ages 7 and 10, authorities said Thursday as they sought the public’s help in their investigation. The adults were a 37-year-old man and a 39-year-old woman, but officials weren’t saying how the four were related. The victims’ names were being withheld while relatives were notified, Albany County District Attorney David Soares said during a news conference in Guilderland. Officials refused to comment about whether the deaths, which were discovered Wednesday afternoon, were a murder-suicide or whether the victims were targeted.

Hollywood actor Alan Cumming has revealed the horrific abuse he suffered as a child, at the hands of his father. The X Men star has opened up about his troubled childhood in his new autobiography, Not My Father’s Son. The Scottish actor talks in detail about his tough upbringing, and says that his father Alex, who died in 2010, used to beat him throughout his childhood. In one particularly troubling chapter, Alan recalls a time when his father held him down and cut his hair off with a pair of clippers used for shaving sheep. “My head was propelled forward by his hand, the other one wielding a rusty pair of clippers that he used on the sheep. They were blunt and dirty and they cut my skin, but my father shaved my head with them, holding me down like an animal,” wrote Alex.

A violent killer shook his girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter with such ferocity that her fatal injuries resembled those of a car crash victim, a court heard today. Connor Gibson, 23, was said to have had a violent ‘flare up’ during which he grabbed and battered Kacey Hambleton in an assault which left her crying in pain. The youngster was later found unresponsive when police were called to her family home in Blackpool at around 10am in April this year. Today at Preston Crown Court, Gibson, from Blackpool, admitted manslaughter after his not guilty plea to murder was accepted by the prosecution.

A Delaware mother was arrested after her 4-year-old daughter brought over 200 bags of heroin to school and passed them out to other children at a local daycare, thinking they were candy, police say. Delaware State Troopers and medics were called to the Hickory Tree Child Care Center on Hickory Tree Lane in Selbyville Monday around 11:45 a.m. Staff at the daycare told police they spotted some children with small bags of an unknown substance.

Rose was just 15, a student at Central Bucks South — and lonely. She logged on to the social networking site Myspace, sharing secrets with an older man about her troubled and abusive home life. He told her what she wanted to hear: that he’d take care of her. He bought her a Chanel purse, spent hundreds of dollars on meals for her and treated her to manicures and pedicures. He made her feel pretty, wanted. Rose, whose real name is being withheld, left home and moved in with him. Soon, they moved out of the area where she had been raised. And then he began asking for “favors.”

A woman who grossly physically abused a young boy, who was found with hundreds of bruises and serious facial injuries, has been jailed by a Melbourne judge sickened by her actions. The County Court heard that during Julie Sevigny’s three days of abuse she forced dog excrement into the boy’s mouth and made him drink her urine and then poured it over his head. Judge Lisa Hannan was told on Monday that after he woke from an induced coma in the Royal Children’s Hospital last November, he had more than 230 bruises on his body, there were ulcers and cuts to his mouth, his face was misshaped and his eyes so swollen he could not see.