SINGAPORE: A man is accused of murdering his five-year-old daughter after months of ill-treating her by keeping her in a toilet with her younger brother, in what the prosecution called “squalid conditions”.
The 43-year-old man cannot be named due to gag orders protecting the victim’s identity and her surviving brother, who might be a witness for other charges the man faces.
The accused went on trial on Wednesday (Jul 5) for the charge of murder under Section 300(c), which is punishable by death or life imprisonment with caning.
He faces another 25 charges for offences including ill-treating his daughter and son by confining them in a toilet for about 10 months and punching his son when he was two years old, but these charges have been stood down temporarily while he is tried for murder.
According to the prosecution’s opening address, the deceased girl and her brother are the children of the accused from his first marriage.
After his divorce, the man married for a second time. His new wife had a daughter of her own from a previous marriage.
In 2014, the man’s two biological children were placed in foster care by the Child Protective Service.
However, the kids were returned to the accused’s custody sometime in 2015 and lived in a rented one-room flat with the accused and his new wife.
At the time of the offences, the accused’s new wife had borne him another daughter, so the man’s two biological children had two stepsiblings.
PROSECUTION’S CASE
According to the prosecution’s case, the accused intended to put his two biological children up for fostering or adoption.
In 2015, he began assaulting the girl and her brother, said Deputy Public Prosecutor Han Ming Kuang.
In the months leading up to her death, the girl and her brother lived in squalid living conditions, first confined in a corner of the flat near a window where they spent most of the day.
They were later shifted to the toilet, where they were confined “practically naked”, said Mr Han.
“Their nights were spent sleeping in the toilet. In the day, they were let out for meals, or when the accused or the accused’s wife needed to use the toilet,” he added.
The couple installed a closed-circuit television camera capturing the view of the toilet so they could monitor the girl and her brother.
On the night of Aug 10, 2017, the accused’s wife tried to get her stepdaughter to exercise, but she refused.
The accused decided to “handle the situation” and went to the toilet, where he physically assaulted her on her head and face between 9pm on Aug 10, 2017 and the early morning of Aug 11, 2017, alleged Mr Han.
At around 7pm on Aug 11, 2017, the accused realised that his daughter had died, said the prosecution.
The prosecution team said the accused took his daughter’s lifeless body to Singapore General Hospital more than 15 hours after discovering her death.
In the meantime, he allegedly packed and threw away items linked to her death, including a camera that covered the toilet area, a phone, scissors, a cane, a rubber hose, bath towels and child safety gates.
He also cleaned up the flat, washed the dead girl, dressed her and placed her in a pram. He allegedly arranged with his wife to tell the police that his two kids had not been in the flat, but were instead at his mother’s flat.
He finally took his daughter’s body to Singapore General Hospital on the morning of Aug 12, 2017.
“She was severely malnourished and covered head to toe in bruises, abrasions, wounds and scars,” said Mr Han.
The girl was in cardiac arrest, with no spontaneous breathing or pulse.
Resuscitation efforts were futile. An autopsy found that she had died of a head injury that was sufficient to cause death and that was likely a result of blunt force trauma from multiple blows.
The accused was assessed at the Institute of Mental Health and found to be not suffering from any mental disorder at the time of the alleged offence.
He allegedly lied to the police in multiple statements, claiming that the girl had died after hitting her head on a slide.
ACCUSED’S WIFE TAKES THE STAND
The first prosecution witness to take the stand was the accused’s wife. The 32-year-old Pizza Hut rider told the court that she was in the midst of divorcing the accused.
Questioned by Deputy Public Prosecutor Norine Tan about how she felt when the deceased and her brother returned to live with her and her husband in 2015, the woman said: “I don’t feel anything.”
Probed about this, she said: “Before the marriage, I have told (the accused) that he will take care of his own kids, and I will take care of my own kid.”
She said the deceased and her brother did not attend school, but her own two daughters did.
Asked why, the woman said there was no placement for them, and the school “did not reply”.
She said her husband usually fed his own kids and showered them. On questioning by Ms Tan, the accused’s wife said her two daughters were of “normal” size while the deceased and her brother were skinny.
“Why were they skinny?” asked Ms Tan.
“They were not given enough food,” the woman answered.
“Who did not give them enough food?” pressed Ms Tan.
“Both of us,” answered the accused’s wife.
She said she was mostly at her mother’s house as her mother was a stroke patient, while her husband would be working. She said he would be the one who went home to feed his own kids as he worked nearby.
The prosecutor asked the accused’s wife why there was a difference in how she treated her husband’s kids versus her own.
The woman closed her eyes before answering: “I don’t have the feeling of them being my kids. I… easy to say, is, I can’t accept other kids as my own kids, even after marriage.”
“The feeling as a mother; I don’t have it for other kids,” she added.
The trial continues, with the accused’s wife expected to be on the stand again on Thursday.
The accused is defended by lawyers Mervyn Cheong, Mr Krishna Sharma and Ms Lim Yi Zheng.