Adoptive mum accused of choking child, swinging head into dressing table

The woman is on trial in the Hutt Valley District Court this week.

A woman accused of choking her adopted child and swinging her by her hair so she hit her head on a dressing table admits abusing the girl, but says the violence did not go that far.

The 59-year-old woman, who has name suppression to protect two children she is accused of assaulting, is on trial before Judge Chris Sygrove in the Hutt Valley District Court this week.

She is charged with assaulting the children manually, with weapons, impeding the breathing of one of them, and also wounding the same child. She has pleaded guilty to two representative charges of assault, which include incidents where she slapped her two adoptive daughters and pulled their hair as a form of discipline.

The wounding incident allegedly happened when the girl was about 8.

In her video interview with police, the girl, who had been adopted as a baby, said “mum” had become angry with her and hit her, causing her to cry, and that the woman had told her to shut up.

“I tried so hard to shut up,” she said. “She’s still hitting me and I’m, like, still crying.”

The now-12-year-old said the woman slapped her in the face, gave her a bleeding nose, then swung her by her hair.

“Then she let go and my head banged on the corner of the dressing table,” she said.

The girl suffered a wound to the top of her head, which her teacher noticed at school.

Her school principal said she went to look at the wound, which she described as “very open” and “fleshy”. She estimated it was about 3-4cm long.

“It was an ugly-looking wound,” she said in court today.

The principal said the girl told her the defendant had pushed or hit her, and that she had fallen and hit her head.

She called the defendant, who said the girl had tripped and hit her head and she did not realise the injury was that bad.

The principal said she considered reporting the incident, but the girl had a tendency at the time to tell the odd white lie and they had never known of any issues of abuse before this, so decided not to. She said she did not suspect abuse.

Defence lawyer Matthew Anderson asked the girl in court if she meant the woman had swung her around the room hard enough for her feet to lift off the ground. The girl said yes.

He suggested that had never happened, which the girl disagreed with. He also said the wound happened because the woman was pulling the girl, who tripped and hit her head. The girl said that was not the case.

Anderson also said the girl’s teacher did not recall her saying anything about being swung around the room by her hair, but the girl said she did tell her teacher about it.

On another occasion, the girl and her sister had got dressed to go to school for the last day of term, which she said in her video interview was usually a “fun” day. But when the defendant woke up she told the girls they were too late to go to school, and told them to get changed into other clothes.

But the girl said she was angry and refused to get changed because she wanted to go to school.

The pair got into a tussle as the defendant tried to forcibly change the girl’s clothes, she said.

The girl said the woman hit her in the face and bit her hand, before hitting her legs with a wooden rod used for opening and closing the curtains. She said she also grabbed her hair and shook her head back and forth.

She said the woman then put her in a chokehold from behind and that she couldn’t breathe. She said she screamed for the woman to stop.

“I said ‘stop’ because I had to say something because if I died she’d be in big trouble,” she said.

In cross-examination, Anderson said if the girl was able to scream, she must have been able to breathe. He asked the girl if she had made up the story, which she denied.

“The truth is, that you were really angry with your mum and she was just trying to hold you to keep you still, wasn’t she?”

He said the woman admitted slapping the girl that day, but that the girl had lied about the other accusations.

The woman is also accused of assaulting another girl, who she adopted after her biological mother died.

She allegedly hit the girl with a chair and with the metal end of a dog collar.

The judge-alone trial will continue tomorrow.

Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.