I saw daughter in hospital bed after suicide attempt

A MUM described her heartbreak at seeing her abused daughter lying in a hospital bed after a suicide attempt.

The devastated parent’s 15-yearold daughter was groomed and molested by predatory sex fiend Alin Marius Cobzaru.

The 27-year-old crawled streets in an Audi late at night, trying to entice young girls with offers of “drugs in return for sex”.

The dad-of-two took his vulnerable victim back to a “party” in Southport, where he plied her with cocaine and vodka, then abused her.

Cobzaru was finally jailed on Friday, after his victim and her family had endured two harrowing trials and an agonising wait for justice.

But that sentence came after the traumatised child had attempted suicide, as a result of her abuser’s despicable actions in 2020.

Her ordeal was outlined by Geoffrey Lowe, prosecuting, who quoted from the mum’s victim personal statement at Liverpool Crown Court.

The mum said at first after the abuse, her daughter had to sleep in the same bed as her because she was too frightened to be alone.

The girl endured “constant nightmares” and would wake up “screaming and shouting”.

Mr Lowe said this was still ongoing 12 months afterwards, adding: “She now tries her best not to sleep. She often sits on the stairs so she won’t go off [to sleep].

“She says her daughter has constant anxiety and initially wouldn’t leave the house. That continued for a seven-week period.

“After that she says there were behavioural difficulties. She describes her daughter as becoming out of control and having severe mood swings and abuse of alcohol and illicit drugs.

“It seems there was an attempt to take her own life and obviously she sought medical advice about that. The doctor expressed an opinion and obviously the mother is also in a way a victim of all of this.

“She says it was heartbreaking to sit next to your daughter in a hospital bed after such an event as the attempt on her life, that her daughter is constantly blaming herself, believing she should have known what was going to happen.”

In the statement the mum - who was sitting in the public gallery just metres from Cobzaru - said: “For our family to go through this trauma during a pandemic has been so difficult.”

Mr Lowe said: “She makes the observation that obviously she couldn’t make contact with her extended family. It was the same difficulty getting help from external organisations.

“She makes the point that there was no additional support for her daughter to help her to deal with the process and deal with what had happened to her.”

The court heard the victim was also self-harming and her family had to keep knives away from her.

The mum said it was only recently her daughter had been able to access professional support and that after improving, she had suffered a “relapse”, again “spiralling out of control”.

She told the court: “The lovely bubbly girl she once was has been replaced by somebody who is sad and unhappy.”

Mr Lowe added: “Things trigger her, smells, sounds, even foreign accents from time to time.”