A coroner has recommended improving co-operation and communication between police and child protective services after a nine-month-old baby was drowned by her psychotic father, who thought she was “evil”.
The circumstances surrounding the death of the boy, known as baby Q, were examined during a four-day inquest at the New South Wales State Coroner’s Court in December last year.
The inquest reported the baby’s father threw her into the water at Jack Evans Boat Harbor in Tweed Heads on the night of November 17, 2018 while “actively psychotic”.
His lifeless body washed ashore two days later, on the sands of Surfers Paradise, more than 30 kilometers to the north.
The nine-month-old baby’s body washed ashore in Surfers Paradise in November 2018. Image: Channel 7
On Thursday, Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame concluded that she could not determine whether the baby had drowned or suffocated before entering the river.
A key aim of the investigation was to discover why the police safety net, child safety agencies and homeless agencies had failed in their duty of care to the nine-month-old girl and her brother.
“The manner in which it fell into oblivion is of considerable concern to me,” Ms Grahame said as she relayed her findings.
The homeless family had interacted with police and child protective services in New South Wales and Queensland on multiple occasions in the months leading up to the nine-month-old girl’s death.
Ms Grahame noted that the family was “homeless or extremely poorly housed” before the baby’s death, making it difficult for agencies trying to provide support to contact them.
While no one person had access to all the relevant information about the family, he said several people “should have understood” that baby Q was “a child in urgent need of protection.”
“It is important to recognize from the outset that while homelessness was a major issue facing the family, their difficulties were much more complex,” the coroner said.
“It may be that focusing on the family’s homelessness has sometimes even contributed to an inadequate appreciation of the actual effect of their parents’ mental illness on (the children).”
He found the baby’s parents were “extremely ill” with mental health issues that were not being treated at the time of his untimely death.
His family had been sleeping rough in the days before his death.
The court was told the baby’s father was an Indigenous man who suffered from schizophrenia and an alcohol dependency disorder and who had attempted to hand his baby over to strangers hours before his death.
He had heard voices telling him to kidnap and drown a baby, hallucinations telling him it was Jesus, and delusions about black magic.
After police arrested the man for killing his daughter, he claimed he had “done a good deed” by ridding the world of “a bad disease.”
“I destroyed the most dangerous thing in the world,” the father said while in a custody cell.
‘She shouldn’t even be called a human being. They’re lucky I killed her. She’s a problem.’
He was found not guilty of the murder of the nine-month-old child due to mental illness.
Mrs Grahame noted that the father’s delusions “frequently centered on conflicts between good and evil”.
“It appears that (baby Q) was somehow entangled in his active delusions and came to represent an evil force in his worldview,” he said.
The baby’s mother also experienced hallucinations centered on “religious or spiritual themes” and at one point believed she was Mother Mary and would give birth to Jesus.
“Baby Q’s death was impossible to predict… (but it is) clear that the risk of some kind of harm happening to him was completely predictable, indeed inevitable, without significant intervention in the family,” Ms. Grahame.
Just hours before her death, police discovered the baby and her brother wearing only diapers and sleeping between their parents in a Tweed Heads park.
Locals paid tribute to the murdered baby after her death. Photo: Greg Stolz
When the investigation began in December last year, Grahame highlighted it was an opportunity to understand what went wrong and how responses could be improved.
“This is an absolutely heartbreaking death of an absolutely beautiful First Nations girl,” he said.
“We are conducting this investigation out of respect for the life of that baby.”
On Thursday, the coroner made recommendations focused on improving communication and the sharing of crucial information between police and child protection agencies.
“The speed with which information is shared can be crucial when working with at-risk families,” she said.
Ms Grahame said it was “encouraging” to hear that child protection agencies in New South Wales and Queensland had conducted internal reviews and implemented improvements since the boy’s death.
He offered his “sincere and heartfelt condolences for the profound loss” suffered by baby Q’s family.