PLEASE CAN I HAVE A DRINK
The haunting last pictures of girl, 7, left without water who died hours later after beating by aunt
WANDERING barefoot into a shop alone, dressed in pink pyjamas and pleading for a drink, this is the seven-yearold girl cruelly abused by her aunt in haunting images of her final moments.
Within hours of the footage being captured on CCTV, Shanay Walker was discovered dead by paramedics i n the home she shared with Kay-Ann Morris, 24, the keen churchgoer who had been trusted to take care of her.
Yesterday Morris, once an aspiring policewoman, was jailed for eight years after being found guilty of child cruelty.
When the little girl was discovered by paramedics in her bed in Bestwood, Nottingham, last July, her body was covered in 50 injuries f rom her f ace to her buttocks. A court heard that a fatal blow to her head had caused her brain to haemorrhage.
Morris claimed Shanay had fallen down the stairs but the case was immediately referred to police.
On Thursday, Morris was cleared of murder but yesterday a jury found her guilty of child cruelty. Throughout the eight-week trial, she had denied the charge and refused to give evidence. A High Court judge branded her ‘wicked’ and described her treatment of the ‘lovely’ child as comparable to s o meone who was trying to ‘break’ a wild horse.
Justice MacDuff said Morris, a Seventh- Day Adventist, had inflicted ‘ untold misery’ on her niece but despite this, the brave little girl had refused to be ‘cowed’.
He said Shanay’s death was ‘about the worst case of child cruelty it is possible to imagine’.
Morris’s mother Juanila Smikle – Shanay’s grandmother – was also convicted of child cruelty and jailed for four years.
The trial had heard how Shanay went to live with her aunt in her flat in 2012 after her natural mother – Morris’s sister-in-law – struggled to care for her. She had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety. However, Richard Pratt QC said Shanay soon became the victim of
‘Worst case of child cruelty imaginable’
regular punishments by Morris and Smikle for misdemeanours such as failing to eat quickly enough or ‘fighting’ while brushing her teeth.
Jurors were told the schoolgirl faced a range of disciplines including being placed in the bath and having water thrown over her, being forced to stand on a landing for 20 minutes, and having the palms of her outstretched hands struck with a hairbrush.
As well as the abuse she faced at home, Shanay was given ‘no respite’ when she left the house to visit her grandmother, police said.
In the final months of her life, Shanay lost her sparkle and went from ‘bubbly’ to ‘introverted and anxious’, the court heard.
Hours before she died, CCTV captured Shanay going to a store near her grandmother’s house desperately searching for a drink.
As she walked to the shop, children playing nearby asked Shanay if she was okay. She replied that ‘her nana and her auntie were being horrible to her’ – these were to be some of the last words she uttered.
In the 46-second clip, the youngster, wearing pink pyjamas and barefoot, is seen walking over to the shop and standing at the till talking to an assistant.
Nottingham Crown Court heard that she pleaded for a drink before Smikle, 54, arrived. Grabbing Shanay by the arm, she allegedly told her: ‘I don’t care if it hurts’. It is not clear whether the shop assistant gave Shanay a drink. The little girl stayed with Smikle until around 1am on July 31 last year when she was collected by Morris and taken back to her house. At some stage later that evening, Shanay died.
Police were alerted to Shanay’s death by Morris’s twin sister KerryAnn Morris, a soldier in the Royal Artillery who was stationed in Germany.
Morris had called her sibling in the early hours of July 31 to say her niece had been badly hurt after she fell down the stairs.
After the call was cut off, KerryAnn told military police in Germany, who then contacted officers in Nottingham. When police went to the family home, a council flat, they were met by a ‘distressed and erratic’ Morris who told them: ‘Baby not asleep. Baby is dead.’
She claimed Shanay had fallen down the stairs and hurt her neck, but that she had been ‘all right’ and had gone to bed.
However paramedics noticed straight away that Shanay was cold and stiff. The prosecutor said they also spotted blood on her head.
In sentencing Morris yesterday, Justice MacDuff said he ‘would be loyal’ to the jury’s verdict that she had not murdered Shanay but he believed she had ‘beat her over and over shortly before she died’. He added: ‘Your ill treatment of that little girl was frequent and wicked and lasted over the two years when she was in your care.
‘You hit her, you taunted her and you abused her in unimaginable ways. You tried to break her like a wild horse – by punishing severely every time you perceived her to be misbehaving.
‘But she refused to be broken; when you beat her, she stood up to you. And you could not bear that she refused to be cowed.’