Emma Tustin and Thomas Hughes eat ice cream while Arthur Labinjo-Hughes starves to death [Video]

Harrowing video footage shows the monstrous stepmother of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes devouring a McDonald’s takeaway while the doomed six-year-old boy starves in the hallway.

Emma Tustin and Thomas Hughes, the pair who were sentenced to more than 20 years each for their roles in the death of little Arthur this week, can be seen tucking into ice creams at her Solihull home in West Midlands, last year.

While the couple relax on the sofa, Arthur is left to stand by himself in the hallway, wearing a fluffy onesie in sweltering temperatures.

In other clips, recorded on the couple’s home security footage, Tustin scoffs into two separate boxes of McDonald’s, while a starving Arthur is left to his own devices.

Tustin and Hughes starved the youngster, force-fed him salt-laden dishes and made him to stand alone for more than 14 hours a day, in a degrading, punishing and hellish regime over the last painful months of his life.   

Social workers, police and teachers are facing damning questions after a six-year-old boy’s stepmother was found guilty of his murder – and his father convicted of manslaughter – after the pair tortured, starved and beat him to death. 

Emma Tustin killed Arthur Labinjo-Hughes by repeatedly slamming his head on a hard surface after she and 29-year-old Thomas Hughes starved the youngster and force-fed him food laden with salt. 

After killing Arthur, Tustin immediately fetched her mobile phone to take a photograph of him as he lay dying in the hallway to send to her boyfriend. 

She called 999 and told the operator Arthur had ‘banged his head’. 

After police arrived at her home, the self-pitying stepmother cried and tried to convince them the stick-thin boy had attacked her – while several miles away he lay dying in hospital. 

He passed away the next day when his life support was turned off, with medics deciding there was nothing they could do due to the catastrophic nature of his injuries. 

Jailing Tustin and Hughes on Friday, Mr Justice Mark Wall QC said the couple’s campaign of cruel abuse against the defenceless youngster had been ‘without doubt one of the most distressing and disturbing cases I have had to deal with’. 

He said of little Arthur: ‘He was a healthy, happy young boy. He enjoyed his food, liked school, loved playing cricket and football and adored spending his time with his extended family.

‘He had been poisoned with so much salt that the levels of sodium in his blood could not be accurately and reliably measured. I am sure that you had also been poisoning him with smaller doses of salt for some time. 

‘It is the only explanation for Arthur being heard regularly to cry out for food while rejecting the food that you prepared for him and offered him. It explains why you had been restricting his access to free water for some time.

‘He had been completely isolated from his extended family. He was forced to live a solitary and lonely life within your home, including being made to stand to attention alone in the hallway of the house for most of the day.

‘He was made to sleep downstairs on the hard floor without a mattress. 

‘In the last three months of Arthur’s life he was subjected to the most unimaginable suffering at the hands of both of you.

‘You both told lies to conceal what was happening in that house.’

Addressing Hughes, he said: ‘You, I am sure, researched pressure pointing Arthur and then did it. Not in the playful way you suggested but as an attempt to cause maximum pain with minimum injury.’ 

Arthur’s maternal grandmother, Madeleine Halcrow, said Arthur loved nothing more than to play outside. But he was forced to wear a fluffy onesie for days during a baking heatwave and stand isolated in a hallway for 15 hours a day over six weeks in a ‘punishing regime’.

The little boy, who ‘loved his food’ and looked forward to mealtimes, was starved and forced to drink a lethal ‘salt slurry’ before he died. CCTV caught the bullies yelling at Arthur, out of sight in the hallway, as they tucked into fish and chips and McDonald’s with Tustin’s children.

The pair ‘denigrated, debased and dehumanised him’, taking everything he loved away from him as they turned Arthur into a ‘desperately sad, thin, weak, miserable child’.

Harrowing footage taken in Arthur’s final hours showed the youngster grimacing in pain with his emaciated frame showing through his tattered pyjamas as he shouted ‘no one loves me’ four times then ‘no one is going to feed me’ seven times in 44 seconds.  

One of his twisted punishments even saw Hughes cut up the boy’s favourite Birmingham City football shirt in front of him. 

On Friday it emerged she had tried to take an overdose and hang herself in prison after already being attacked in jail by inmates dousing her with salt.