The grandmother of a baby boy who was murdered just months after being placed for adoption has revealed the full extent of her desperate efforts to keep him within the family, insisting that if social services had heeded her pleas he would still be alive today. Debbie Davey, now 66 and cancer-free, spoke of the anguish that has consumed her since the death of her grandson Preston Davey, who was born on 16 June 2022 and would have turned four years old around the time the men responsible for his death were finally sentenced. Preston spent only the first five days of his life with his birth mother before being taken into care under an emergency order by Oldham Council. He then lived with foster carers where, by all accounts, he thrived as a happy, alert and interactive child. Yet within four months of being placed with the couple approved to adopt him he was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, the victim of what a court later described as unremitting abuse. His maternal grandmother has now made clear that the family never wanted him to leave the care system for strangers and that she herself had planned to raise him once she recovered from a serious illness.

Preston was the son of Sarah Davey, who as a 14-year-old in 1998 was convicted alongside another teenager of the murder of a 71-year-old pensioner in Failsworth, near Oldham. The judge at that time described the crime as unspeakably wicked. Sarah Davey has since been in and out of prison on multiple occasions. When Preston was born at Wythenshawe Hospital she was able to spend roughly a week with him in hospital before the care order took effect and he was placed with foster parents. Those foster carers provided a stable and loving environment. They took him for regular contact visits with his mother and sent pH๏τographs to the wider family. Debbie Davey has said repeatedly that Preston was loved and wanted, and that she does not want anyone to believe he was simply discarded. The original plan within the family was that she would help raise him. That plan collapsed almost immediately when she was diagnosed with breast cancer the day after his birth. She began chemotherapy the following week, lost her hair, became very poorly, and eventually required a mastectomy after she could no longer tolerate further treatment. “I was there at the birth and I have loved him from that moment,” she later recalled. “When he was born I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and was feeling OK because I’d not yet started the treatment. But I knew I was starting chemo the following week and wouldn’t be well enough to have him.”

Despite her illness Debbie Davey and her daughter both made clear to social workers that they did not want Preston adopted. Sarah Davey spoke directly to the social worker and begged the foster mother to keep him longer. The foster mother explained that she could not because she was only a temporary carer. The family then asked social services to allow Preston to remain with the foster parents until Debbie recovered sufficiently to take him herself. “We wanted social services to allow Preston to stay with foster parents until I was better but they wouldn’t allow it,” Debbie said. “If they’d agreed, he would be here with me today.” She has since recovered fully from cancer and continues to care for Preston’s older sibling. She has expressed deep anger at the decisions that removed any possibility of the child remaining with blood relatives, and she has questioned whether the system moved too quickly toward adoption once a potential couple had been identified.

That couple was Jamie Varley, then 37, a former secondary school head of year and textiles teacher, and his partner John McGowan-Fazakerley, then 32, a financial sales manager. They had been approved as adoptive parents in January 2023 after what was described as a robust ᴀssessment process. Preston began living with them at their home on Staining Road in Blackpool in early April 2023 when he was approximately nine to ten months old. Within a short time the child who had been described in pre-adoption medical reports as gorgeous, happy, alert and interactive began to suffer a series of concerning medical episodes. He was taken to Blackpool Victoria Hospital on three separate occasions in the months that followed. Each time explanations were offered and accepted. Social workers and health professionals continued to monitor the placement. No decisive protective action was taken.

On 27 July 2023 Preston collapsed while in the sole care of Varley. He was rushed to hospital in cardiac arrest and was pronounced ᴅᴇᴀᴅ later that evening. Varley told medical staff and police that he had left the toddler in the bath for two or three minutes and returned to find him submerged. A post-mortem examination ruled out drowning as the cause of death. Instead it established that Preston had suffered more than forty traumatic injuries, both external and internal, and that the cause of death was acute upper airway obstruction. The examination also found evidence consistent with Sєxual abuse. During the subsequent investigation it emerged that in the four months Preston had lived with the couple he had been treated as a plaything, subjected to routine physical and emotional abuse, Sєxually ᴀssaulted, and had indecent pH๏τographs and videos taken of him.

An independent child safeguarding practice review by Oldham Council, paused during the criminal proceedings, has since been restarted. Two Members of Parliament have called for a full public inquiry into the circumstances that allowed the adoption to proceed and into the missed opportunities to intervene after Preston began presenting with injuries and medical crises. The Children’s Commissioner for England has described the death as a failure of the state and the safeguarding system. Preston Davey lived for only thirteen months. The first nine of those months were spent largely in the care of foster parents who loved him. The final four months ended in his death at the hands of the men who had been approved to give him a permanent home. His grandmother continues to insist that a different decision by social services in the early months of his life would have kept him safe within the family that wanted him. The questions raised by that claim now form part of the formal reviews that will examine every stage of the process that led from a hospital birth in June 2022 to a courtroom in June 2026 and a whole-life sentence for the man who murdered him.

Source: https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/preston-daveys-gran-wanted-keep-34128960