Baby boy's drowning deliberate, says Crown

The mother is now on trial in the High Court at Auckland accused of her son's murder. Photo / NZ Herald

After finding her son face-down in a bath, a mother did not try to revive him or call for help. Instead, she wrapped his lifeless body in towels, put him on a bed and spent the next 25 minutes on the internet looking through friends' Facebook pages.

The mother, whose name is suppressed, had left the 13-month-old alone for at least 15 minutes in a deep bath - the water was almost at shoulder level.

When she returned to the bathroom she found him dead, and is now on trial in the High Court at Auckland accused of his murder.

The Crown alleges she deliberately left the infant in the bath knowing he was unsteady. She has pleaded not guilty: she says his death was accidental and she was in a depressive state when he died.

A court order forbids the Herald from naming the accused or publishing a picture of her. The names of her husband, their daughter and the dead baby are also suppressed.

Crown prosecutor Rachael Reed said the woman was normally a "careful and safety-conscious mother of two" but the morning her son died, on November 8 last year, she made a deliberate decision to leave the baby alone in the bath.

After she ran the bath, she put him in it with toys to play with and soaked him for a while before leaving the bathroom and pulling the door almost shut.

For the next 15 minutes, she made her daughter breakfast before returning to the bathroom and finding the boy slumped in the water. Ms Reed said that despite having some medical training, the mother did not try CPR, call 111 or even phone her partner, who had his cellphone with him.

She picked the boy up, shook him and wrapped him in blankets and towels, laying him on a bed in the main bedroom.

The trial will hear evidence that she then logged on to the internet at 8.52am and stayed on there almost to the minute her partner came home, when she told him the baby was dead.

While she was online she looked at friends' Facebook pages and viewed an internet news site.

The mother, who is 29, was struggling to cope with looking after the little boy and his sister. They had been in Child, Youth and Family care for several months and came back to her two days before the drowning.

"She could not cope with both of her children and could see no way to solve the problem except for his death," Ms Reed said.

She said the woman acted the way she did because she was "desperate".

The defendant's lawyer, John Anderson, said the defence case was that the baby's death was "an awful accident with fatal results, but an accident nonetheless".

He said she thought that her son was strong enough not to fall over.

"She was simply preoccupied with her daughter for 15 minutes," Mr Anderson said, "and never thought that any harm would come to him."