SINGAPORE: The wife of a man accused of beating his five-year-old daughter to death testified in court on Thursday (Jul 6) about the “abnormal” way her husband would hit the girl.
The prosecution played closed-circuit television footage of the 43-year-old man striking, punching and kicking the girl, who was clad only in a diaper, in one of the routine beatings that occurred before the fatal assault.
The girl appeared terrified, crying and cowering against the corner in a bid to get away, with her legs shaking in fear, while her toddler brother sat quietly an arm’s length away from her with his head down.
The accused watched the footage with his head in his hands, later covering his face and breaking down.
The man, who cannot be named to protect the victim’s identity and her surviving brother, had claimed trial the day before to a charge of murder.
The prosecution’s case is that the man had ill-treated his daughter and son after they were returned to his custody in 2015.
While the man’s biological children were confined for most of the time in a small space, his wife’s biological daughters slept with her on a mattress and went to school.
The man’s wife, who is in the midst of divorcing him, took the stand for the prosecution.
She told the court that the deceased and her brother were first confined in a corner of the one-room rental flat for months.
It started out as a “naughty” corner, but they were soon confined there most of the time, being let out only for meals or occasionally when the accused was not around.
Later, they were transferred to being confined in the kitchen, and finally to the toilet as they kept playing with their diapers.
The woman testified that she had hit the man’s children five to six times in total herself.
Probed on why, she said one incident was when she saw the deceased eating faeces.
The court had heard a day before that the child was malnourished and skinny when she was presented dead at the hospital on Aug 12, 2017.
On another occasion, the woman returned home with the accused and found that the house was in a mess, with rubbish everywhere and the deceased holding onto a piece of rubbish.
She said she slapped the girl.
PROSECUTOR PLAYS FOOTAGE OF ABUSE
Deputy Public Prosecutor Norine Tan played a clip extracted from either the accused’s or his wife’s phone – they each had an application on their phones that showed live footage and recorded footage from CCTV cameras they set up where the deceased and her brother were confined.
The clip showed the girl and her brother clad only in diapers, sitting down pressed against the wall. The area was fenced off by a bookshelf and a wardrobe, with only a small space for a parent to enter.
At the time, the girl was about four years old and her brother was a year younger.
The accused was shown entering the small space – which was barely big enough to accommodate him and the two kids.
The girl stared at him in fear and pressed up against the wall to avoid him, but the accused was shown picking her up by her hair and punching her, before he squatted to her level and elbowed her strongly in the face.
The girl fell to the floor from the blows and curled up on her side. Her diaper came off partially after her father kicked her multiple times, swivelling on his heel to add force to the kicks.
He then retrieved a long object resembling a cane or ruler and hit her repeatedly.
The assault in the 10-minute-long video continued until the man picked up the girl’s brother and placed him just outside, but the boy continued to look at the assault on his sister.
At some point, the man used a wet tissue to clean off blood from his daughter. The last portion of the video showed the man changing the girl’s diaper.
The prosecutor asked the accused’s wife how she felt about the two children being in the corner.
WITNESS SAYS SHE FELT SAD
“To be honest, I do feel sad for them,” said the woman.
“Then why did you not stop (him) from keeping them there?” asked Ms Tan.
“I have … like … told him before marriage that he take care of his own kids, I take care of my own kids,” said the woman, who was stepmother to the deceased and her brother.
She said the accused would hit the two children with his hands, slapping and punching them, or cane them. Usually it was because they tore up their diapers.
She said she would try to stop him when he was agitated or really angry, “because the way he hit, is really abnormal”.
“The way he punch or hit is like, non-stop, or really look like … not him. When he’s too angry or frustrated, he is like (a) different person, he won’t know what’s happening around him,” said the woman.
She said her husband had gone for anger management counselling before.
She added she would not do anything to stop him other than shouting when he was like this because he would hit or push away whoever was around him.
On questioning by Ms Tan, the accused’s wife admitted hitting the deceased and her brother a few times. Asked how she felt, she said: “I feel guilty. I feel sad. I feel remorseful for hitting.”
“If you felt bad then why did you hit them again up to five or six times?” asked Ms Tan.
“It’s because they wanted to eat faeces and didn’t listen to me,” answered the woman.
She said that the two kids were first confined with diapers on in the toilet, but her husband later removed the diapers because the kids were playing with them.
She said she felt sad and remorseful about the two kids being confined in the toilet, but said she did not stop her husband because of what she had said to him before marriage – “Your kid is your kid, my kid is my kid.”
THE FATAL INCIDENT
The accused’s wife described what happened the day the deceased was allegedly beaten to death.
On the night of Aug 10, 2017, the accused asked her to get the kids to exercise, because they had been lying on the toilet floor all day.
She entered the toilet and asked the two kids to do squats while holding the sink. While the boy complied, the girl did not.
The woman went out and asked her husband to continue what he wanted her to do and walked off to a mattress where she slept with her own two daughters.
Her husband, who was in a chair in the living room, retrieved a cigarette before heading to the toilet.
“At first there was no sound, followed by increasing voice,” said the woman.
After some loud, indecipherable shouts, she heard a loud bang.
Her own two daughters were frightened and hugged her, so the woman went to check what happened as it was unusual.
As she rushed to the toilet, she heard the deceased’s loud crying “decrease” in volume.
She saw the girl squatting down, crying and whimpering in the toilet.
When she asked her husband what happened, he said he had hit and punched her. However, because the woman did not see any bruise or blood on the girl, she went back to the mattress to attend to her own crying daughters.
Her husband joined her a few minutes later and said he wanted to send his children to the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF). He said he wanted to “make them healthy” before putting them up for adoption, something he had mentioned before.
That night, the accused and his wife played with his wife’s daughters before heading to bed.
Before the woman fell asleep, she heard her husband’s son crying in the toilet, so she looked at the CCTV footage on her phone, which showed the girl turning as she lay down.
After this, she went to sleep.
The next day, the woman called in sick at work and spent most of the day sleeping on the mattress after passing her daughters to her husband for school.
The woman was three months pregnant with a son at the time.
At about 6 to 7pm, she needed to use the toilet and went to the washroom to ask the two children to wake up and go out.
“But (the girl) didn’t move,” said the woman. “So I (turned) on the water hose and put water on my hand and sprinkle on her face, but she still didn’t wake up, so I tap on her cheek. Her cheek was cold.”
She went out to call the accused, who checked on the girl before telling his wife that his daughter “is not there anymore”.
“After I heard that (the girl had) left, passed away, I cannot think of anything,” testified the accused’s wife.
She went to fetch her daughters from school, on her husband’s instructions, and returned to see her husband pacing in the flat, looking “blur and stressed out”.
She asked him if he had performed CPR on the girl, and he said he had, and tried to give her water, but the liquid just came back out.
“I said I didn’t want to go to prison, and I don’t want (my daughters) to go to the foster,” said the woman.
“Why did you think you may go to prison?” asked the prosecutor.
“Because I’m staying together with him, I’m married to him, and we are living in the same household and I’m not, like, protecting any of the kids,” said the woman.
She said she felt scared, sad and remorseful that her stepdaughter had died.
“And I didn’t even, like, do anything, like send her to doctor or hospital,” she said.
She said her husband later told her that he was going “to do a forced sex” and that he was going to hit her. Her husband asked her to report him to the police and ask for a personal protection order.
The trial continues.
If convicted of murder under Section 300(c), the man can be sentenced to death, or to life imprisonment with caning.