Mum denies knowing of bruises on daughter

A woman accused of beating her daughter has told a court she had never seen the bruises and scratches covering the girl’s body until seeing photographs in court.

The woman, who cannot be named, is on trial for assaulting her 9-year-old daughter with intent to injure, hitting her in the head with a hammer, neglecting her, and two charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The girl’s injuries were uncovered by two Air New Zealand cabin crew members as they removed face paint from the girl on the flight to Christchurch on June 24 last year.

The Crown alleged that the mother beat the girl two days before the flight and then arranged for her to leave Hawke’s Bay so that Oranga Tamariki caregivers would not see her injuries. ‘‘My mum grabbed a hammer and was hitting it on my head,’’ the girl told a specialist interviewer.

Earlier this week the jury heard from paediatrician Dr Janet Ferguson, who treated the girl at Christchurch Hospital. She said the bruises were ‘‘too numerous to count’’, and she believed they were caused by blunt force trauma and had been inflicted on different occasions.

Giving evidence yesterday, the woman said she had never hit the girl and had never noticed any of the bruises. She said her daughter was often fully covered up.

‘‘Had I have known, I’d have done something about them. That’s bad, that’s very bad. I didn’t do that,’’ she said. ‘‘No person in their right mind would send their kid away like that.’’

The woman denied punching her daughter in the lip and said the cuts had been caused by her daughter gnawing her teeth, and hitting it against a trampoline. She said she sent her to Christchurch ‘‘because every time something goes wrong she flips out in tantrums. I don’t know how to deal with that’’. The paint on her face had been applied by a sibling, the woman said.

The woman said for three nights before the flight she had woken to find her daughter outside with a hose on, screaming and jumping on a trampoline.

She denied sending a text to her sister on June 22 saying ‘‘2late i smashd her’’. She also denied sending messages that said ‘‘I took it to the xtra’’ and ‘‘delete texts’’.

The trial is to resume in Napier on Tuesday.