Mother accused of killing baby

Crown says killing was murder, defence contends mother committed infanticide

Warning: This article contains distressing content

As 27-year-old Melody Ngawhika held her dead baby in her arms, she pondered what to do next. She went into her bedroom, wrapped the lifeless 6-month-old boy in blankets, and pulled a nearby duffle bag closer.

But she couldn’t bring herself to place the child in the bag, instead succumbing to her own conscience.

“Arrest me. I’ve done it. I’ve suffocated my baby,” the Crown says Ngawhika told officers on the porch of her Rotorua home in the small hours of August 29 last year, after ringing the police.

She later told them: “The voices told me to do it.”

The 28-year-old, charged with the murder of her son Elijah Abraham Ngawhika, lost name suppression yesterday on the first day of her trial in the High Court at Rotorua before Justice Pheroze Jagose.

Ngawhika, who is on bail, sat in the dock sobbing as Crown prosecutor Amanda Gordon opened the case.

The facts of the case are generally agreed upon, Gordon said, with the question for the jury being Ngawhika’s level of responsibility.

“You will not have to determine if Ngawhika is responsible for Elijah’s death, but what level of responsibility she should have for that death.”

The Crown suggests it was murder, while the defence says the offending amounted to infanticide.

Gordon told the court that Ngawhika had moved to Rotorua at the beginning of 2021, with Elijah being born in February. She was also caring for her other child, then aged 4, and living with her brother at a Rimu St address.

“By all accounts, she was a good mum,” Gordon said. “The evening of Saturday, August 28 was, on the face of it, a relatively normal night.”

Ngawhika and her daughter watched TV on the couch before she went to attend to her newborn son, who was teething.

At a point in the night that isn’t clear, Ngawhika “pushed and held” Elijah against her shoulder, suffocating him.

The Crown says she then wrapped him in blankets and fetched a nearby bag, with the intention of placing Elijah’s body inside and disposing of it.

“But, ladies and gentlemen, she didn’t really know how to do that, and

I think the reality is she couldn’t do that.”

Ngawhika’s lawyer, Fraser Wood, told Justice Jagose that the death of Elijah was not murder, but instead infanticide — an older charge seldom used in New Zealand courts today.

The legal test for an infanticide conviction is whether or not the “balance of [the defendant’s] mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth”, the Crimes Act states.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment.

The defence rests on the claim that Ngawhika’s mind was disturbed at the time of Elijah’s death.

“And her disturbed mind was the consequence of childbirth.

“Elijah’s death, on one level, came completely out of nowhere. There is no evidence of violence or neglect against the two children,” Wood said.

The trial continues, with the first witnesses to be called today.