Guilty of murder, mother who beat little boy with a cane ‘ because the Bible told her to’
A MOTHER who claimed she was following the Bible during a ‘campaign of cruelty’ against her young son has been convicted of his murder.
Christina Robinson, 30, lost her temper and violently shook three-year-old Dwelaniyah, later telling police he had choked on a cheese sandwich, a court heard.
She had earlier deliberately immersed him in scalding water, causing severe burns that would have caused excruciating pain.
Robinson, of Ushaw Moor, Co Durham, treated his injuries herself and did not seek medical help as safeguarding concerns would have been obvious if a health worker saw him. A member of the Black Hebrew Israelite religion, she admitted hitting the boy with a bamboo cane but claimed she was following a Bible scripture which advised the use of the rod for the ‘correction’ of children.
She told Newcastle Crown Court that her reason for using the cane was that he was messing around with his food.
After causing a fatal brain injury to her son on November 5, 2022, while she was the only adult in the house, she took more than 20 minutes before dialling 999. She first spoke to her husband on the phone despite him being 240 miles away serving with the RAF, and then used Google to look at how to resuscitate a child.
Her chilling 999 call was played to the jury in which she could be heard telling an operator she did not think her son was breathing.
She was heard saying: ‘He’s only three. He’s not breathing. He was eating and then his eyes just went all weird and then... I’ve been doing CPR for about five minutes.’
When the emergency services arrived, Robinson appeared calm as she explained her version of events to a police officer. A post-mortem examination revealed her son had been the victim of a series of assaults and had sustained a number of nonaccidental injuries.
But Robinson, who denied murder and child cruelty, told officers he often had problems chewing his food.
She said: ‘He had a brown wholemeal cob with grated cheese. I didn’t see it straight away but I did see out of the corner of my eye his head had dropped. I could hear the sound of when you’re drowning and trying to gasp for air.’
Richard Wright, prosecuting, said: ‘Somebody had been deliberately hurting this little boy and had been doing so over a period of time. That person was his mother.’ Robinson will be sentenced on May 24.
‘His eyes went all weird’