‘Punishment enough’: judge fires mother for the death of the baby in the bathroom

A grieving mother has been released without conviction after pleading guilty to the murder of her 11-month-old son who died unattended in a bathroom.

The tired mother had left two of her young children unsupervised in a bathroom when the tragedy struck last year.

The two children had been playing outside before the woman, who has permanent name deletion, placed them in a bathtub and turned on the shower.

Today in Gisborne Superior Court, Judge Francis Cooke said that normally the mother would remove the stopper from the bathtub each time.

But that day she must have been distracted and didn’t, she said.

By letting the water run, the woman began to do other household chores, such as washing, washing and washing dishes.

The older brother screamed from the bathroom several times but the mother did not realize that it was cause for alarm.

The bathtub took 16-24 minutes to fill.

When the woman returned, the younger boy was lying on his stomach and not responding.

She grabbed him and tried to do CPR.

The 11-month-old boy was admitted to intensive care at Starship Children’s Hospital, where investigations showed that he had suffered irreversible brain damage.

Judge Cooke said that tragic cases like this unfortunately happened from time to time.

The judge considered three similar cases in which the accidental death of a child had occurred during a period of inattention, in two of the cases the mothers were discharged without conviction.

Judge Cooke said one of those cases involved the same kind of “mental confusion.”

“You had noticed that the plug was in the hole and you had to remove it. But you just didn’t do it like you usually do.”

As in those three other cases, she had made a mistake, Judge Cooke said.

“Parents make mistakes all the time,” he said.

“Just because it has had such tragic consequences here doesn’t mean it wasn’t just a mistake.”

For a father, the ongoing pain and anguish arising from the loss of the child was punishment enough, he said.

The judge ruled that a conviction was not necessary when the woman appeared in court acknowledging to her community that she made a mistake that resulted in the death of her son.