Mother jailed for killing her son, aged two
A MOTHER who suffered from a personality disorder and stabbed her toddler son to death was jailed for five years yesterday.
Hazel Waters, 47, admitted killing two-year-old Muhammad Hassan Khan between October 15 and 16, 2014.
Her plea of guilty to manslaughter was accepted and Judge Patrick McCarthy, passing sentence at the Central Criminal Court, said her disorder meant that her responsibility for the killing was diminished. However, he also noted that her treating doctor at the Central Mental Hospital said she had only superficially engaged with doctors regarding the boy’s killing.
Her doctor described her as ‘evasive and guarded’ and said she refused to discuss what happened to Muhammad Hassan.
At a sentencing hearing last month, the court heard that on the day of the killing, Ms Waters, of Ridge Hall, Ballybrack, Dublin, sent a text message to her adult son, Jessie, that read: ‘Hassan
Manslaughter plea accepted
is a fake child’, and added: ‘They are making people and children to look the same.’
She had also claimed that her son and her sister were ‘clones’.
The alarm was raised when, later that day, Ms Waters arrived at her sister-in-law’s house without Hassan and was unable to say where he was. She told her sister-in-law, Maria Waters, that ‘they’ had taken him but was unable to say who they were or where they had taken him.
Maria also noticed that Ms Waters was not wearing her hijab. Ms Waters had converted to Islam, her husband’s faith, and was extremely devout.
Maria called gardaí, who went to her home, entered through an unlocked door and found the apartment in disarray and the child dead in the bedroom.
A post-mortem showed he had suffered multiple wounds to his neck from a pair of scissors. A number of wounds were superficial but deputy State pathologist Dr Michael Curtis identified two wounds, one 10cm in depth, that caused the boy’s death.
When gardaí interviewed Ms Waters she said she couldn’t remember harming the child, that she would never harm him, and that she didn’t know what had happened to him. When the messages to her elder son were read to her she described them as ‘bizarre’ and said she couldn’t remember sending them.
Detective Sergeant Joe O’Hara agreed with Brendan Grehan SC, defending Ms Waters, that she had been married to a man named Saleem Khan and had taken a barring order out against him after he took Muhammad Hassan away from her. Gardaí were called and the social services had become involved with the family as a result of that incident.
In the weeks before the killing Ms Waters’s family had become concerned about her mental health. Dr Brenda Wright of the Central Mental Hospital said she wrote a report on Ms Waters on behalf of the prosecution.
In the report she noted that Ms Waters’s history suggested she had a mental health issue for some years. Her relationship with Mr Khan was ‘difficult’, the court heard. They had married shortly after they met and Ms Waters said he would become violent for no reason. She said he assaulted her while she was pregnant and that he’d tried to strangle her on two occasions.
Dr Wright said Ms Waters had a personality disorder characterised by instability, mood swings, and intense episodes of anger, depression and anxiety that could last hours or days. The court heard that at the time of the killing, Ms Waters was suffering from an acute and transient psychotic disorder that could have caused delusions, hallucinations and bizarre behaviour.
However, Dr Wright said there was insufficient evidence to say whether she qualified for Section 5 of the Criminal Law (Insanity) Act, which allows a person to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Yesterday, Judge McCarthy imposed a sentence of seven years with two suspended. Ms Waters’s sentence was backdated to October 16, 2014 when she first went into custody.