Infant died from couch fall, court hears in babysitter’s trial
A young babysitter who allegedly left a baby girl with a fractured skull and fatal brain injuries told police the child had been hurt falling from a couch, a court heard.
Aaliyah Ashlyn Chand had just celebrated her first birthday when she was critically injured at a house in Worcester St in Linwood, Christchurch, on January 6, 2015.
The youngster was rushed to intensive care, but died the following day with her parents Dev Chand and Anjani Lata at her side.
Aaliyah suffered two skull fractures, bleeding in the cranial cavity and severe damage to her eyes – injuries prosecutor Mark Zarifeh said were caused by her babysitter Shayal Upashna Sami in a ‘‘moment of anger or frustration’’.
Opening his case in Sami’s murder trial at the High Court in Christchurch yesterday, Zarifeh told jurors Aaliyah’s ‘‘severe and extensive’’ head injuries were inconsistent with a fall from a couch.
Instead they were a result of a deliberate act – a ‘‘reckless killing’’ – with expert medical evidence suggesting the back of the little girl’s head had been hit against a hard surface.
Zarifeh told jurors they would hear evidence about a stain containing blood and probably saliva that was found on a towel used to wrap Aaliyah, another on the defendant’s T-shirt and on a pink dress found on the couch, while another stain was found on a mattress protector in a bedroom.
Defence counsel Jonathan Eaton QC argued the girl’s death had been ‘‘an accident, full stop’’, saying: ‘‘There was no crime committed here. There was no murder, no manslaughter, there was no assault.’’
Sami, a Fijian-Indian woman who was 18 at the time of Aaliyah’s death and was herself five months pregnant, spoke through an interpreter to deny one charge of murder.
The 21-year-old wept as graphic photographs of the girl’s bruised ear, cheeks and forehead were shown to the jury.
The court heard Aaliyah, also Fijian-Indian, moved to Christchurch from Wellington with her father, a bus driver, in October 2014, three months before she died.
The pair briefly lived with his niece while Aaliyah’s mother remained in the capital, before moving into their own home in Addington. Jurors were told that in November that year Chand asked Sami, the wife of a work colleague, to start babysitting his daughter while he was at work.
The day before Aaliyah was injured her father noticed a small red bruise on her cheek while he changed her nappy. When he asked Sami about it the following morning as he dropped his daughter off before work, the defendant denied she had caused it.
The court heard Sami and Aaliyah were alone in the flat that day, but about 6.15pm the teenager asked a neighbour for help with Aaliyah as she was ‘‘not moving and floppy’’. The girl was rushed to hospital but was unconscious and never recovered. Her life support was turned off the following day.
Sami later told police and hospital staff she had been cooking in her kitchen when she heard a thud, and believed Aaliyah had rolled off the couch just a few metres away from her.
Zarifeh said such a fall would have been insufficient to cause her horrific injuries and Aaliyah’s father told the court his daughter was not able to walk or climb without help and could only just pull herself to a standing position while holding onto something.
Zarifeh said: ‘‘Even if Aaliyah had been standing – in other words, if she had woken up, got into a standing position and then fallen – even if that happened, it is very unlikely that her serious head injuries would have been caused by a fall.’’
He told jurors the nature of bruising indicated Aaliyah’s injuries were deliberate and pathologist Dr Martin Sage believed bruises to her head were similar to those usually associated with the ‘‘tight grasping of an adult hand’’.
Eaton suggested Aaliyah had pulled herself up on to a couch arm or bookshelf and simply fallen backwards.
‘‘She was a toddler and she tragically fell. Nothing else makes sense in this case.’’
He urged the jury to consider that Sami was only facing a criminal charge on the basis of medical opinion, ‘‘the opinion of people who were not there’’.
The trial, adjourned until today, is expected to last for two weeks and hear from 25 witnesses.