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A young girl is having nightmares and telling her mum she’s worried about being stolen away after she was trapped in a toilet cubicle and attacked at Auckland’s Crowne Plaza hotel.
The 9-year-old had been in a ground floor toilet in the Albert St hotel on Wednesday evening when she says a teenage girl, aged about 14 or 15 years old, pushed into her cubicle.
The teenager put her hand over the young girl’s mouth and stopped her from leaving, the 9-year-old later told her mum.
When the 9-year-old tried to get away, the teenager repeatedly punched her in the face, the girl says.
It was only when the 9-year-old tried to scramble away under the cubicle door that an older older sister of the attacker was alerted, and the young girl was able to run out of the toilet to her mum.
“She’s asks me, did they like put a tracker on her, will they enter our home and take her away from me,” her mum told the Herald.
“All I can do is tell her is it was an accident and she is safe with mummy.”
The child was left bruised across her whole face.
The mum took her daughter to the doctor, who recommended bringing the girl back next week to see if the family should consider sending her to therapy over the incident.
‘I don’t know what they wanted with my daughter’
Police have confirmed they are investigating following an “altercation” at the Crowne Plaza hotel.
The family had been eating at Japanese restaurant Ten-hana when the girl’s mum let her daughter go to the toilet across the lobby by herself.
The family have lived in Auckland previously – now spending their time between New Zealand and China – and also dined at the restaurant several times, finding the environment safe and friendly.
“I never expected anything to happen,” she said.
But then her daughter came running back to her in tears, saying she had been punched.
The mum rushed to the toilet where she found the teenager and her sister.
The teenager claimed the young girl had opened her door and so she punched her because she was embarrassed.
The mum said she apologised if her daughter had accidentally done that but that it was no reason to hit a young child.
The teenager kept arguing that she had felt embarrassed when an older relative joined, defending the teenager, and a bigger argument followed while they were trying to leave, the mother said.
It was only after they left that the mum said her daughter told her that it had been the teenager that barged into her toilet cubicle.
On hearing this, the mother called police.
The officers photographed the young girl’s bruises and took her and her mother home.
Hotel cameras had captured the sisters arguing with the mother and daughter after the event, the mother said, and she believed that police had the footage.
The mother said she has no idea why the teenager attacked her daughter.
“I don’t know what these people wanted to do to my daughter,” she said.
“I don’t know their motivation, I really need the detectives, the police to follow up this case.”
The child said a teenager locked her into the bathroom and started attacking her.
“If we don’t find out the motivation of these people, don’t put them to justice, this may happen again to other kids.”
‘We hope this never happens to another New Zealand child’
The girl was born in New Zealand and, while they have moved back to China, the mother’s homeland, the pair return each winter to visit friends and see the country.
But now her mother fears it’s no longer safe in Auckland for children.
“We don’t know the attacker’s motivation or what we can do for the rest of our holiday. We believe this is a dangerous situation and hope society becomes more aware of the potential dangers,” she said.
A police spokesperson said they were “following lines of inquiry following a reported altercation in a bathroom at a central Auckland hotel, about 5pm on August 7”.
St John has been contacted for comment.
The incident is the latest in a string of attacks on people of Asian descent in Auckland.
A recent immigrant to New Zealand was traumatised this week after allegedly getting attacked by a group of children on a bus in Auckland on a route now notorious for recent racist and anti-social incidents.
Two other racially abusive incidents have happened on Auckland’s buses in the past two months, with one woman filmed going on a racist and violent rant on the same bus route, No 70, in July and another woman allegedly beating a schoolboy with a metal pole in June. Both women have been charged by police.
