A mother previously convicted of assaulting her infant daughter is now facing trial for the child’s murder, following the child’s death due to severe injuries sustained two years prior.
In 2020, 32-year-old Sarah Ngaba was found guilty of causing grave, life-altering head injuries to her daughter Eliza, then only seven weeks old.
The devastating injuries were inflicted in a November 2019 incident, which involved both forceful shaking and a significant head impact, resulting in a fractured skull.
After the assault, Eliza was placed in foster care the following month, surviving for 33 months before succumbing to a viral respiratory infection on August 15, 2022, at the age of two.
Ngaba acknowledges that the head injuries contributed to Eliza’s death by leaving her severely disabled and susceptible to serious complications from infections, including death. However, she disputes the murder charge.
She contends that the case should be considered ‘infanticide,’ a partial defense applicable when a mother’s mental state is ‘disturbed’ due to the lingering effects of childbirth.
Prosecutors have rejected her plea, meaning a jury at Birmingham Crown Court will be asked to decide whether mental disturbance reduced Ngaba’s ‘responsibility for killing her child’.
Jonas Hankin KC, opening the case for the prosecution, said the infanticide defence could only be used in ‘limited’ cases.
‘It is not a general defence to the pressures of new motherhood, it is not established simply because a mother was tired, in pain, isolated, struggling to cope, or failed to bond naturally with her baby,’ he told jurors.
He continued: ‘The prosecution says this: when the evidence is looked at carefully, the true picture is not one of a childbirth-related disturbance of mind, it is one of anger, frustration, resentment and a loss of self-control.’
The jury were told that records made at the time did not ‘show a mother whose mind had been disturbed by the effects of childbirth’, nor did Ngaba’s own earliest admissions ‘describe such a disturbance’.
‘What they describe is anger, frustration, temper and a loss of control,’ the prosecutor said.
Sarah Ngaba, 32, was convicted in November 2020 for causing catastrophic injuries to her baby
He said the defendant’s account ‘changed repeatedly and dramatically’. At one stage, she accepted striking Eliza ‘in anger’, but later ‘tried to blame Richard Ezanga, the baby’s father’.
‘The prosecution say, as you will discover, the defendant has been shown to lie instinctively, altering her account according to whatever she thinks is likely to best serve her interests at any given time,’ the prosecutor said.
‘Once you put the witness evidence, the records, the chronology and the expert evidence from doctors in psychiatry together, the more convincing explanation is not infanticide, but an assault committed in temper, an assault committed in frustration by a mother who was isolated and resentful towards her estranged partner and towards her baby, but not someone suffering from the kind of childbirth-related disturbance of mind that the statute requires.’
The court heard Eliza was born in September 2019 and, just weeks into her life, was taken to the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford ‘floppy, unresponsive and having seizures’ on November 13 2019.
Ngaba ‘made no reference to Eliza having suffered any physical trauma’ when speaking to medical staff and gave the impression that her daughter was ‘simply unwell’, the prosecutor said.
The defendant also gave the impression she was ‘annoyed that it had been necessary to bring Eliza to hospital’ and started ‘talking about other problems in her life, including issues with her landlord’.
But Eliza had been seriously assaulted that morning by her mother at their home in Telford, Shropshire, causing a skull fracture, fresh bleeding and bruising around the brain, bruising and swelling to her eyes and bleeding around the spinal cord.
‘Once Eliza had suffered that injury, she would not have behaved normally, interacted normally or fed normally,’ Mr Hankin said.
He said the evidence of Ngaba’s demeanour in hospital pointed towards ‘detachment, self-concern and lack of proper concern for Eliza’s suffering’, rather than ‘childbirth-caused disturbance’.
Jurors were told that Ngaba was convicted the following year, in November 2020, of causing grievous bodily harm with intent to her daughter.
Eliza died from an infection on August 15 2022, but the prosecutor said ‘she would not have died from that infection had she not been left so vulnerable by the injuries inflicted by the defendant’.
Turning to Ngaba’s state of mind, the prosecutor said that Eliza was delivered through a ‘routine’ caesarean section and was discharged four days later ‘having recovered well post-caesarean section’.
‘The records created at the time do not describe a mental collapse, psychiatric disturbance, psychosis, or any childbirth-related disturbance of mind of the kind later alleged,’ Mr Hankin said.
‘The wife of her father’s best friend, known as Aunt Bebe, was with the defendant when Eliza was born. She described the defendant as happy and saying that Eliza was her best friend.
‘If childbirth had disturbed the balance of the defendant’s mind in a significant way at that stage, one might expect some sign of it in these early maternity records. There is none.’
Ngaba and the baby stayed with the aunt for three weeks, during which time the relative expressed ‘no concern about any post-natal psychiatric disturbance’ which the prosecutor said ‘does not fit comfortably with a later picture of a mother whose mind had been disturbed by childbirth’.
Nor were any concerns recorded by a health visitor who saw mother and baby in September and October 2019, the court heard.
‘The defendant’s own report at that stage was that she felt happy since the birth and had lots of family support,’ Mr Hankin said.
On October 8 2019, Ngaba returned to live on her own with the baby in Telford, which the prosecutor accepted would have led to feelings of isolation.
But he told the jury: ‘The prosecution says there is another feature of the evidence which is highly significant.
‘It is agreed between the psychiatrists from whom you will hear that the defendant was prone to outbursts of anger and irritability.
‘These were pre-existing features of her personality, not something caused by childbirth, and the prosecution say it is these that provide a more convincing explanation for what happened to Eliza.’
The prosecutor said there was evidence from a man who was in a relationship with Ngaba while she was pregnant, who said: ‘Sarah would throw tantrums and get angry for no reason…she did lash out at me sometimes and would punch me’.
Ngaba was said to have told police in a prepared statement about the attack on Eliza – ‘from which she later retreated for a time’ – in November 2019: ’I lost my self-control and struck her. I have a bad temper.
The trial continues.
Ends
