Cause of baby's death uncertain

By MONIQUE DEVEREUX

An autopsy report on the death of a Nelson baby agrees she might have been suffocated but says there is no evidence to prove it.

The little girl's father has been accused of her murder after allegedly telling police he suffocated the baby on the day he discovered she had a severe brain disorder that would render her a vegetable.

The professional man, who has name suppression, has pleaded not guilty and will be tried in November.

His lawyer, Greg King, told the court on Tuesday he did not accept his client had any case to answer.

In evidence that was not read to the court at this week's depositions hearing in Nelson, but sighted by the Herald yesterday, forensic pathologist Martin Sage concluded the baby died from "anatomically obscure causes".

She had no bruises on her body and although she had traces of milk in her windpipe, her lungs showed no sign of damage caused by suffocation.

However he went on to say "in a young infant, particularly one with a pre-existing major brain anomaly, prolonged but careful and gentle obstruction of the mouth and nose could result in death with no anatomically detectable lesions to demonstrate the occurrence of fatal asphyxia".

"The autopsy findings are therefore compatible with the account given to the police of her death even though they do not provide any independent proof that asphyxia caused her death."

The 5-month-old baby was found dead in her father's arms as he lay in bushes near the family home in the early hours of the morning on May 15.

The man told police he had taken a handful of pills with two glasses of straight whisky before holding his hand over the baby's mouth.

He had wanted to make sure she didn't wake up, "that she remained the perfect baby she was".

He said he "just snapped" after learning the truth about his daughter's condition.

The family had been in Christchurch for the previous few days while their baby had a brain scan.

They had been expecting to hear their child had a degree of blindness and would need a shunt put in her head to drain excess fluid off her brain.

Instead, they were told their baby had only just survived birth. She had a brain only as developed as a 13-week-old foetus, and she should really have been stillborn.

She would need constant care and would develop epileptic fits.

In other evidence that was also not heard in open court, a friend of the couple described the couple's reaction to the news as "devastated'.

Talking about the baby the accused told her: "If she was a dog you would put her down."

The baby was born with a rare condition called lissencephaly which is when the brain develops smoothly, without the folds of a normal brain.

It develops between the second and fifth month of pregnancy when the cells migrating from the middle of the brain up to the surface stop moving.

In his evidence Paul Shillito, the paediatric neurosurgeon who was last to deal with the family on the day they discovered the extent of the baby's condition, said he knew of only five other cases and all were as severe as the Nelson baby.

He was shocked to hear of the baby's death several days later.

"In all my years in this profession dealing with severely disabled children I have never seen or heard of anyone, particularly a parent, taking the life of their child after being told news as bad as that I told him."