Girl punched to stop her crying: court
By INGRID BOWN
Saturday, 2 February 2008
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A MAN who has admitted to killing a 17-month-old girl told police he punched the child to the stomach to "stop her crying", causing her to vomit, but denied inflicting a fatal head injury, the Newcastle Supreme Court has heard.
The man, 33, told police, during an interview played to the court, that the girl fell off a slippery dip while playing with other children outside a Mount Hutton home on January 12, 2005.
Crown prosecutor Wayne Creasey told Acting Justice Timothy Studdert he should regard this story as untruthful.
The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter. He told detectives during the September 2005 interview, played at his sentencing hearing yesterday, that
the toddler was "a bit wonky" after the fall and he comforted her by holding her and rubbing her on the back, but when she wouldn't stop crying he punched her twice in the stomach, "hard but not hard".
He told police he had been coming down from amphetamines at the time. He said he was fed up because he could not handle the crying, had been raped in jail and his girlfriend was "giving me the run around".
The girl was found dead in her bed the following morning.
A forensic pathologist said her head injury could not have been caused by a fall from play equipment and was likely to have been caused by a blow. The girl also had puncture wounds to her stomach, the court heard.
The man told police he "felt like scum" after punching the girl, which ccurred while the child's mother was out.
When her mother came home, she saw the child, who was allegedly sitting in front of a fan, vomiting, and asked: "Is she dead".
She told police she did not see the child conscious again that night, the court heard.The man, who frequently became agitated during the interview, claimed the girl seemed OK until he found her the next morning.
The child's grandfather read a victim impact statement to the court, in which he said the "violent, untimely passing" of the toddler "burdens me on my
mind, terrifies me in my sleep, terrifies me in my waking hours".The court was told the accused suffered from an intellectual disability and mental illness, including paranoid psychosis, which was thought to be drug-related, but neither had a "causal relationship" on the incident.
Mr Creasey argued that the crime was made worse by the fact that he had failed to seek medical attention when he must have known the girl was "terribly ill" following the assault.