A MOTHER who “flipped” and beat her daughter to such an extent that the child died in hospital two days later from bleeding and swelling to the brain was jailed yesterday for four years.
Postmortem reports were read by Judge Carroll Moran yesterday, detailing how the child had suffered “rotational” as well as direct impact injuries and had sustained a multiplicity of bruises consistent with multiple blows or forceful slaps.
The judge remarked on the “savage nature of the assault on a defenceless child of 3½ years of age” resulting in 70 separate injuries and in the child’s death from a brain injury two days later.
The severity of the attack on the child resulted in a completely unnecessary loss of life, Judge Moran told the Central Criminal Court in Tralee, Co Kerry
Last week Monika Paczkowska, (34) Fountain Court, Tralee, pleaded guilty to the wilful ill-treatment of her daughter, Sefora Kycwak, in a manner likely to cause injury or suffering at Killeen Woods, Tralee, on August 2nd and 3rd, 2005.
A charge of manslaughter was withdrawn by the State. At the sentence hearing yesterday Judge Moran said the cruelty count to which Paczkowska had pleaded guilty carried a maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment. The child had died as a result of the ill-treatment inflicted on her by her mother.
The doctors who had treated Sefora at Kerry General Hospital did not believe the injuries were accidental or compatible with the history given by the accused that the child had vomited as a result of drinking cola and had fallen.
Reading from the postmortem report carried out by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margot Bolster, Judge Moran said the cause of death was swelling and bleeding of the brain. Thirty-one of the more than 70 areas of bruising were found on the child’s head and neck.
“The multiplicity of bruises and the sites of the bruising are consistent with multiple blows or forceful slaps and the findings are in keeping with an element of rotational injury as well as direct impact injuries,” the judge read.
The combination of findings meant the injuries were not accidental and not compatible with a fall, it stated.
It was the prosecution case that at about midnight on the date in question the accused had “lost it” or “flipped” after the child had soiled herself in her clothes and subjected the child to repeated assaults around the head and body as a result of which the young girl died, Judge Moran said.
It appeared the accused had never had a good relationship with her daughter, who was born three months prematurely and was kept away from her mother for two months. There may have been a bonding issue, the judge said.
Neighbours said the child was well-fed and dressed, but a friend of Paczkowska told of the accused pinching the child, pulling her hair and slapping her. The child’s father was in Poland for a wedding at the time of the incident. A Roma from Poland, Paczskowska arrived in Ireland in 2000 as an asylum-seeker and was granted citizen status in 2002. She had had a difficult life and had five children by three different fathers at the time of the incident, the court was told. The father of Sefora was violent towards Paczskowska. All the children were now in foster care. The accused had been raped by four men at the age of 14, the judge noted, and was at some risk of self-harm.
Judge Moran also noted that she did not have previous convictions. Other mitigating factors were that she had pleaded guilty, the attack was not pre-meditated, she was a foreigner and was isolated, and had suffered a degree of opprobrium.