A COURT has heard a seven-year-old girl found starved to death at her Hawks Nest home in 2007 was “almost mummified in appearance”, was kept by her parents in a room “with a really strong smell of urine” and weighed nine kilograms when she died.
Her parents, a 48-year-old man and 35-year-old woman who cannot be named for legal reasons, are charged with her murder. They have pleaded not guilty.
Crown Prosecutor Peter Barnett, SC, warned East Maitland Supreme Court last week that the upcoming photographic evidence could be distressing.
“If images of the holocaust, of Nazi Germany concentration camps disturbed you, you many find evidence in this case confronting,” he said. Police and paramedics called out to a triple-0 call from the girl’s father on November 3, 2007, Mr Barnett told the court, found the girl’s “extremely wasted” body on a urine-stained mattress. He said the father made the call up to six hours after he said his wife first realised her daughter was dead.
According to a transcript of the emergency call, the father told the operator “my daughter’s died…she died a couple of hours back or something. I can’t think”.
He reportedly said his wife tried to resuscitate the girl for three hours.
“She virtually told [me] that she vomited black…black…stuff…and little black ants were coming out of her mouth,” the transcript reads.
The court also heard police and ambulance officers describe walking into the house and finding the girl.
“To me, she was very drawn, almost leathery in appearance, almost mummified in appearance,” paramedic Timothy Kirkpatrick told the court. An autopsy found the girl weighed nine kilograms, the court heard, and had suffered long-term malnutrition. Forensic pathologist Dr Kasinathan Nadesan said the girl’s level of emaciation was the worst he had seen in 35 years.
“I saw a little child, dead obviously, in an extremely emaciated and wasted and dehydrated [state],” he said.
“It looked almost like a mummy to me at the time.”
Mr Barnett also cross-examined the family’s neighbour from their time at a housing department place at Matraville, Sydney.
The woman, who also cannot be identified, said she never saw the girl outside but spotted her peering out her bedroom window “a good part of the time”.
But the window was broken, replaced and boarded up around eight months before the family moved to Hawks Nest in August 2007, the neighbour said. Last Monday’s proceedings introduced evidence from hospital staff that the girl was given unprescribed medication. Prince of Wales Hospital’s Dr Lee Sutton said she was “concerned” when the mother said she sometimes gave her daughter a quarter of a tablet to get her to sleep.
“I was concerned because the medication was not prescribed for her but for her older sister, and I counselled her against using it.”
Two removalists hired by the family for their move from Matraville to Hawks Nest – John Giavis and Lee Szkolnik – said they were specifically instructed not to enter one bedroom of the house.
They told the court the home was “very messy” with “close to shin high rubbish and general waste and a strong sense of urine”.
The trial continues this week before Justice Robert Hulme.
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