A mother didn’t know why were eight-week-old had bruises, but she thought she’d let her sleep and take her to hospital the next day.
However, her daughter was limp, discoloured and struggling to breathe within just hours and she made a distressed call to 000.
“My baby’s not breathing,” she said to emergency services in a recording played at the NSW Supreme Court in Darlinghurst on Wednesday.
Over the seven-minute phone call, the mother can be heard repeatedly giving her daughter CPR in an attempt to revive her.
“She’s going blue,” the mum says.
“Don’t stop, okay, don’t stop,” replies the man on the other end of the phone.
Desperate attempts to revive the newborn were unsuccessful, and she was pronounced dead once she arrived at the hospital on August 12, 2014.
The suspicious circumstances around the baby’s death led to her father being charged with murder – a charge he has pleaded not guilty to.
In his opening address on Tuesday, the father’s lawyer High White said the man had told police that “he accidentally dropped [the baby] on the floor, which he now believes caused the fatal blow to her head.”
The court heard the man had told the baby’s mother it was the toddler that had given the newborn a black eye after hitting her with a hairbrush.
The baby’s grandmother was at the house on August 11 and noticed a “little bit of bruise” on the baby’s head.
“I asked what’s wrong with her,” she told the court.
“My daughter said to me ‘I don’t really know but I think [a sibling] hurt her.’”
Then at 5am, the grandmother was woken up by her distraught daughter saying: “Mum, baby’s not breathing properly.”
Upon noticing bruising at the hospital, Detective Senior Constable Scott Ford asked the mother what had happened.
“She said [the baby] had gone to sleep but through the night she noticed [her] breathing was difficult and [she] was limp when picked up,’ he said.
The mother also told him the baby had also become discoloured.
The trial continues.
