NSW mother guilty of killing toddler son

A NSW woman has been found guilty of the manslaughter of her two-year-old son.

After a two-year-old boy died in hospital in 2012, his body had a litany of injuries, including fractures to several ribs, a shoulder blade, his forearm and clavicle.

Now his mother has been found guilty of his manslaughter.

It took less than a day for the Supreme Court jury to find the mother, who cannot be identified, guilty to the boy's unlawful killing on Thursday.

The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was two years and seven months old when his stepfather called triple zero on the afternoon of August 3, 2012 and complained the toddler was "limp".

Just over an hour later the boy was pronounced dead at Wollongong Hospital.

During the course of her trial, Crown prosecutor Chris Maxwell QC said the boy died from multiple injuries likely sustained in the days prior to his death.

The first, Mr Maxwell said, was a blunt force injury to his head which would have caused the toddler to lose consciousness, be in an "altered state" and possibly even have seizures.

Meanwhile, a blunt force injury to his abdomen would have caused the boy's gut wall to break and his bowel contents to leak out.

The Crown did not allege the mother inflicted the injuries but said her failure to seek medical treatment "substantially caused or accelerated the death of her son".

It wasn't the first time she had failed to act.

Upon his death, the boy was found to have a litany of injuries, including fractures to several ribs, a shoulder blade, his forearm and clavicle.

The Crown said the mother had not sought medical treatment on these previous occasions and evidence of the boy's living conditions would also point to neglect.

What the jury didn't hear was evidence from residents about the mother's apparent neglect of her children and how this allegedly worsened when she started her new relationship.

In evidence deemed inadmissible at trial, the crown sought to put to the jury allegations of previous assaults on the toddler.

In one incident a resident alleged she had seen the mother walk over to the boy with a cigarette in one hand and pick him up by the arm and throw him over the front fence of their home.

"It was probably about a metre in distance that she would have thrown him," the resident said.

Justice Geoffrey Bellew also restricted evidence of allegations of neglect to just her son, rather than her other children.

Numerous residents in the area said they noticed the children were always grubby, wore the same clothes, were always hungry and that there were animal faeces in the lounge room.

In a statement from August 2012 one resident said they had complained to the Department of Housing about the conditions of the house, but "there was never anything done about it".

The same resident said the mother's "personality and demeanour changed" when she started the new relationship with the boy's stepfather - referred to as K.

"When K came into her life it was if she didn't care about her daughter, the deceased or the dog."

The mother will return to court in March.


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Source: AAP


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