The uncle of a 6-year-old boy found dead in Kobe instructed other family members to prepare the suitcase used to discard the boy’s body, investigators said Monday, citing the boy’s grandmother.
The grandmother, 57-year-old Yumiko Hosaka, who was found on the street after allegedly being hit with a steel pipe by her children and confined at their home, says that Daichi Hosaka, 32, gave the instructions to his siblings Saki Hosaka, 34, the boy’s mother, and twins Tomomi Hosaka and Asaka Hosaka, 30, police sources said.
Police arrested the four siblings for allegedly assaulting the grandmother, and are investigating their involvement in the death of the boy.
The murder case surfaced last week after the grandmother was found on the street with bruises. She said she had escaped from the family home, where she had been detained for about three months in a closet.
During the course of the investigation, Saki Hosoka guided police to a grassy area near their home, where Nao was found dead in the suitcase with bruising on his back, with an autopsy showing that Nao died around June 19. Security video footage showed the four siblings going out with a suitcase on that date.
The grandmother had been living with her three daughters and Nao until Daichi Hosaka moved in with them at the end of last year. The situation at the home appears to have deteriorated after that — Nao started to be absent from day care from February, and day care staff found multiple bruises on his shoulder and buttocks in April.
A police officer stands guard in front of the home of Nao Hosaka in Kobe on Saturday. | KYODO
In early May, neighbors saw Nao crying and shouting from the balcony, “Help, I can’t go inside.”
After the day care reported a case of possible child abuse to the city in April, municipal officials visited the home. But Saki Hosoka and the grandmother said that they had no clue where the bruises came from.
When city officials visited the home again on May 1, the bruises were gone, prompting them to conclude that there was no imminent need to deal with the case further. However, Saki Hosoka asked city officials whether it was possible for the city to temporarily take the child in, saying she found it difficult to raise him.
The city’s children’s welfare center prepared to take in the boy the next day, but when they visited the home, the grandmother told them that the family could take care of Nao on their own.
“We had taken necessary measures,” said Yoshiko Maruyama, a city official in charge of child policies.
But Jun Saimura, a professor emeritus on child welfare at the Tokyo University of Communication, said that the municipality should have done more given that the mother had asked the city to take care of her son.
Meanwhile, Shueisha Online has reported that Saki Hosoka herself had been a victim of child abuse when she was young, quoting classmates who said that she regularly went to school with the same clothes for a week or two and had been locked out on the balcony of her home.
It also reported that some of the suspects in the Nao case had been eligible for benefits granted to people with intellectual disabilities.
Post time 26-7-2023 11:23 AM
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Post time 26-7-2023 11:26 AM
