Police, the city of Iwaki and neighbors all held information suggesting a 3-year-old boy was being abused before he died, and none of it prevented his death, Fukushima prefectural police and the city have disclosed.
The boy was Hinata Okudera, police said on the 10th. They sent Ryo Matsui, 41, a company employee, to prosecutors on suspicion of injury resulting in death, upgrading the injury charge on which he had been arrested.
Matsui is suspected of grabbing Hinata by the neck, throwing him down and stepping on his stomach at an apartment in the city's Taira district around 4 p.m. on the 8th. The boy's mother, who was present, took him to a hospital, where he died around 10 a.m. on the 9th.
A summer consultation
The mother had consulted a local police station this summer, saying Matsui, her partner, was violent toward her. Officers checked but found no external injuries on the mother or on Hinata.
Police shared the information with the prefecture's Hama child consultation center and kept in regular contact with the mother, who told them there was no trouble. "We could not grasp that she was suffering violence," police said.
The center said police provided the information in July. Because it did not come as a formal 通告 (tsūkoku) — a mandatory report of suspected abuse — the center judged the child safe at the time. "We cannot answer about our response after that," it said.
A mark seen four days before
Iwaki city said on the 10th that it learned of suspected abuse in late October from the certified kodomoen — a combined kindergarten and nursery — that Hinata attended. The city shared the information with the center and confirmed a mark on the boy's face four days before the incident.
His mother explained it as carelessness on the child's part, and the city said it could take no further steps.
Complaints from the building
Neighbors had also seen behavior that raised suspicion. The management company for the apartment where the three lived said the mother and son moved in about a year ago, and that Matsui began visiting afterward. The three were seen walking together.
From around September, residents began reporting that the boy was being put outside at night and was crying after being locked in a car. The company warned the mother three times and planned to notify the child consultation center if another problem arose.
"After that there was no more information from the neighborhood, and I was relieved, thinking things had calmed down," a company official said. "Then this happened. It is difficult to know how far a management company should intervene in a family's affairs."