“Papa, no!”
“Papa, no!”
“Papa, no!”
Those were the last words of Tulsi Amola, 5, in January last year after her father, Mukesh Prashad, instructed her to move from the back seat of their vehicle to the front passenger seat.
“Today we are both going to die,” Prashad would later recall telling his daughter in the empty carpark. Moments later, he smothered her to death with a pillow.
His reason for doing so, he would tell police just hours later, was because he was convinced he had infected the child with herpes. He wanted to save her the pain and isolation of growing up with the virus, he said.
Details of the macabre scene were made public for the first time today as prosecutors in the High Court at Auckland gave their opening address for his murder trial.
Prashad, 38, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
But Crown prosecutor ’Aminiasi Kefu said the first part of the trial will focus solely on whether it can be proven he killed his daughter and if he had murderous intent. To do so, he said, he’ll be relying on the defendant’s own words.
“He told police this was his plan and he did it intentionally,” Kefu said during his opening address.
“He was fully aware of what he was doing and he carried it out.”
At the time of the killing, Prashad had recently returned to his Takanini, South Auckland, home to visit his wife and daughter over Christmas. He had earlier moved to Melbourne for work while his family remained in New Zealand. It’s in Australia, prosecutors allege, where he picked up the herpes virus.
On Christmas Day, the family went together to Maraetai Beach and his daughter suffered bug bites. The parents later took their daughter to the doctor, who confirmed the sores were bites that had been scratched too much. But the defendant was convinced she had herpes, Kefu told jurors.
An autopsy would later confirm that the child never had the virus.
Prashad told police that, after deciding he needed to kill his daughter, he considered causing her to overdose on medication such as Pamol but settled on suffocation “because that was the lesser of the evils”.
He carried out the plan on January 5 last year, leaving the family home around 8pm to pick up the child from a friend’s home. He smuggled a pillow outside the bedroom window so his wife wouldn’t see it, he said.
After retrieving the child, he parked in a quiet industrial area where he used to work and killed her, he said. Later that evening, he returned to the same area and walked into a nearby estuary – bashing his head with rocks in an attempt to kill himself.
“He obviously failed,” the prosecutor said.
The defendant parked outside the Manukau Police Station after midnight and called 111.
“Hi there,” he said on the call, asking police to come outside. “Actually, I’ve killed my daughter and her body’s in the boot.”
Police who scrambled outside found him in the driver’s seat, muddy and with blood on him. He agreed to sit down for a recorded interview around 6am, after he had been treated at hospital for his own injuries.
Detectives would later review his internet activity, finding that in the days before the killing he had conducted Google searches about herpes, sleeping pills, Pamol and the police phone number.
Defence lawyer Sharyn Green told jurors during her opening statement that she would not dispute that her client is the person who killed the child. The main issue jurors will have to decide, she suggested, will be if her client was suffering a disease of the mind at the time of the killing, to the extent that he didn’t understand what he was doing was wrong.
The defence will call one witness – a psychiatrist who interviewed the defendant three months after the child died – at the end of the trial, she predicted.
The Crown may call their own psychological expert to give a different opinion, but it will ultimately be up to jurors to decide if insanity has been proven, Green said.
Prashad sat in the dock throughout the first day of trial wearing an untucked white dress shirt over what appeared to be red flannel pyjama pants.
The first witness, his wife and Tulsi‘s mother, told jurors Prashad seemed to have lost a huge amount of weight when he returned to New Zealand for the final visit.
He had earlier told her over the phone that he had lesions on his genitals, she recalled.
“I think he told me something like it happened on its own, but I don’t remember what he said,” she testified with the help of an interpreter via audio-video feed from another room in the courthouse.
Prashad was concerned enough about infecting his family that he no longer kissed his wife and daughter and wouldn’t share dishes or utensils, she said.
He also seemed to hold his daughter less, the woman told jurors.
It was Prashad’s idea to take the girl to the doctor, his wife said. Just a day earlier, he had encouraged her to go to urgent care after she spotted a pimple on her chest.
However, she left after being told the wait would be three hours, she recalled.
“My husband said, ‘We can wait for you but we shouldn’t wait for the child,’ because he was very caring,” the woman recalled of the doctor’s visit.
The next day, she recalled, her husband seemed normal until he left to pick up their daughter from a friend’s house around 7pm or 8pm and never returned.
“I tried to text him, call him, he didn’t answer,” said the witness, whose name is suppressed.
“Then, I don’t know, my intuition, I started crying for no reason.”
She decided to call 111 but did not get any answers about her husband’s whereabouts until early the next morning when police showed up at their home.
Recalling the moment in court, she choked back tears as the interpreter gave her a gentle pat on the back.
“Did you find anyone?” she recalled asking the officers.
They told her that her daughter had died.
The witness said Prashad had moved to New Zealand around 2010 on a student visa and eventually got permanent residence.
She recalled being set up with him in India as part of an arranged marriage in 2016, when he was visiting family there, and joining him in New Zealand the following year.
He only moved to Australia reluctantly, she said, because he couldn’t find work in New Zealand and they had a mortgage to pay.
“He was very caring,” she recalled. “He was very good. And he used to take care of me and my daughter.”
The trial is set to continue tomorrow before Justice Pheroze Jagose and the jury.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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