A CONSULTANT forensic psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital told a Limerick court that, in his opinion, a woman accused of attempting to murder her eight-year-old daughter was in the throes of a psychiatric episode at the time and did not know what she was doing was wrong.
The accused, who cannot be named in order to protect the identity of the child, has denied one count of the attempted murder of the girl at a temporary accommodation centre in the Mid West on September 22, 2022.
The girl sustained 79 stab wounds to her chest, back, arms, and legs, but survived after Gardaí and paramedics raced to the scene and kept her from bleeding out.
Doctors at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) performed an emergency life-saving procedure on the girl stemming blood that was filling into a protective sack around her heart. She was then transferred to Crumlin’s children’s hospital where doctors performed open-heart surgery on her.
After her arrest, the accused told Gardaí that she stabbed the girl multiple times with a knife and tried to choke her.
She said that she had been having suicidal thoughts and was “out of my mind” at the time. The court heard she had wrongly believed child protection services were going to take her daughter away from her and her intrusive thoughts were overwhelming her.
In March 2022, six months prior to the attack, the mother and daughter had fled to Ireland from war-torn Ukraine. The court heard the accused had a history of psychiatric episodes in Russia where she had previously been an in-patient in the mental health services.
The accused told Gardaí that, on the morning in question, she jumped out of bed in an “anxious” state, grabbed a knife from a kitchen at the accommodation centre, and attacked her daughter who was asleep in their bedroom.
The woman said she had initially contemplated carrying out a “sick fantasy” in which she would take herself and her daughter and jump off the Cliffs of Moher, but she said she changed her mind.
She said she stabbed her daughter in her chest, back, and arms and tried to strangle her with a mobile phone charger and a flex lead from a hair dryer.
“I started choking her with the lead, I started cutting her with the knife, I don’t know how many times I cut her, the knife was a sharp knife,” she told Gardaí.
The accused said she brought the girl from their bed to an en suite bathroom where she continued stabbing and choking her.
She said she also knelt on the girl’s neck to choke her and that she eventually stopped pressing down when she saw her daughter’s face turn blue.
She said she also contemplated using a hairdryer in water in the bathroom to try to electrocute her daughter.
She said she eventually lay beside the girl, who the court heard was bleeding out into the shower drain when Gardaí arrived.
The accused told Gardaí that at one point during the attack her daughter “woke up” as she was attacking her with the knife in their bed.
She said the girl was crying and using her hands to try to protect herself form the knife.
Asked how many times she stabbed the girl, she replied: “Many times.”
She said she did not know why she did it, but that she was in a “robotic” state and couldn’t remember everything she did.
“I knew that we had to finish our lives, it’s crazy, I didn’t see any other option. If I wasn’t sick I could have found another way out of it,” she told Gardaí.
The woman said she couldn’t explain it: “Chaos took over my mind.”
“I hope she will not be effected emotionally, I love her so much.”
The woman said she blamed herself and nobody else.
She said when she was later informed her daughter had survived the attack she thought it was lies.
When Gardaí asked her about her daughter’s multiple stab wounds, the woman replied: “Why did I do all that to my own child?”
She was shown the knife found at the scene and confirmed it was the knife she used to attack the girl.
The court heard the accused was taken from the scene by ambulance to hospital for a suspected overdose of prescribed drugs.
Defence witness, forensic consultant psychiatrist Dr Paul O’Connell, Central Mental Hospital, gave evidence on Thursday that, in his opinion, at the time of the attack the accused didn’t know what she was doing was wrong, due to her being in the throes of a mental disorder.
Dr O’Connell said he believed that the accused couldn’t refrain from what she was doing at the time.
The accused’s barrister, senior counsel Mark Nicholas, argued that if the jury accepted the defence witness’s medical opinion they could consider that the accused was “not guilty by reason of insanity”.
Dr O’Connell said it appeared the woman was suffering from “nihilistic and deluded” thoughts at the time, and that this mental disorder reached a crescendo resulting in her “having a catastrophic view of her circumstances”.
The trial continues before a jury of seven men and five women.