Photo/Illutration Ayano Ueda, who is suspected of murdering her second son, is seen in a car in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, in October 2020. (Yoichiro Kodera)

YOKOHAMA--The Kanagawa prefectural government plans to establish a third-party investigative panel to determine why a boy twice placed under temporary protective custody was returned to his mother whose three other children had died.

The boy, Yudai, died in August 2019, eight months after he returned to his home in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, from a child welfare center. He was 7 years old.

His mother, Ayano Ueda, 42, was arrested on Feb. 20 on suspicion of murdering the boy. She has denied the allegations.

The prefectural government said at a news conference on Feb. 21 that when Yudai, Ueda’s second son, was born, the child welfare center knew that two of her children had died.

Her first son died when he was 5 months old, and her first daughter died when she was about a month old. The deaths occurred about 10 years before Yudai was born.

The child welfare center, with the cooperation of the Yamato municipal government, helped to support Ueda in raising Yudai.

But in October 2012, Yudai stopped breathing and was taken to a hospital. The following month, the center took temporary protective custody of the 5-month-old boy.

He was later sent to a child protective facility and stayed there until March 2015.

In April 2017, Ueda’s third son died at home when he was 17 months old. The child welfare center again placed Yudai under temporary protective custody.

The center decided that the boy should be placed under protective custody at a child protection facility, but Ueda rejected the idea, and the case went to court.

“With her children dying one after another, we questioned whether (Yudai) could live safely at the family’s home,” a prefectural government official said.

When Yudai was at the center, he reportedly told others, “My mother threw me down, and my mouth was bleeding.”

In October 2018, the Yokohama Family Court sided with the mother, and the temporary protective measures were lifted the following month.

“We could not submit documents to prove that child-rearing was inappropriate in this family,” the government official said. “This was truly regrettable.”

After Yudai returned home, the child welfare center and the Yamato city continued to visit Ueda to check up on her and the boy.

Staff members went to her home four days before Yudai died but found “no signs of abuse.”

Kanagawa prefectural police suspect Ueda covered Yudai’s nose and mouth at her apartment on Aug. 6, 2019, leading to the death of the elementary school first-grader.

Police quoted Ueda, a temp staff worker, as saying, “I did nothing wrong.”

A judicial autopsy showed that Yudai suffered internal bleeding at the back of his head, and the cause of death was brain damage resulting from a low oxygen level.

According to investigative sources, an autopsy was not conducted on the body of her first son.

The prefectural government said Ueda told a hospital that the boy died after he accidentally swallowed milk.

An administrative autopsy of the daughter showed that she died of sudden infant death syndrome.

Another judicial autopsy could not clarify the cause of death of Ueda’s third son.

But like Yudai, the third son did not have any pre-existing conditions. Police are now also investigating that death.

(This article was written by Shinjiro Omiya, Rikuri Kuroda, Yoichiro Kodera and Kyoko Doi.)

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