Abused baby, Baby-L’s mom acquitted
The mother of Baby L, who is in a permanent vegetative state after being severely abused, was found not guilty on charges of child abuse and attempted murder, but her boyfriend was convicted of abusing the two-year-old child.
A young mother accused of having abused her baby was found not guilty by the High Court in Pretoria on Friday.
Judge Nico Coetzee, however, convicted the mother’s boyfriend on a charge of child abuse.
Baby L had been so badly abused at the age of two that the little girl is now in a permanent vegetative state as a result of brain damage.
The judge said the young mother was lazy, but he concluded that she had not been aware of the fact that her boyfriend had been abusing her little girl. She was acquitted on all charges against her.
Coetzee rejected the evidence by the 37-year old boyfriend that Baby L had suffered several injuries when she fell down a flight of stairs on 15 December 2013 at the flat where the couple lived in Amandasig, north of Pretoria.
He was found not guilty on a charge of attempted murder and failure to render medical assistance.
The boyfriend will be sentenced on Monday.
Delivering his judgement, Coetzee accepted the testimony of the couple’s domestic worker, who had testified that the young mother never tended to her child and rather chose to sleep when she returned home from work.
He said he therefore did not find it strange that the mother testified that she could not remember which bruises her daughter had suffered at the time, as the mother simply did not pay much attention to the little girl.
“She was probably not even aware of the bruises,” the judge said.
He rejected testimony by the boyfriend that Baby L had suffered injuries on 15 December 2013 when she had fallen down a flight of stairs at the couple’s Amandasig flat and that the two-year-old had again been injured on 27 December when she had fallen off a washing machine.
Medical testimony in the trail stated that Baby L was wheelchair-bound because of severe permanent brain damage and that for the rest of her life, the girl would need 24-hour a day care.
In addition to the injuries to her brain, the court heard, Baby L also had injuries to her pancreas, her kidney had been bruised and she had blood in her stomach – an indication of an older injury – when she was taken to Steve Biko hospital in December 2013.
At the time, the toddler also had an older injury of a broken pelvis and had fluid in her lungs.
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