A mother is accused of killing her five year-old son and leaving his two siblings fighting for their lives, after reportedly telling her husband they were going on a picnic.
The 42-year-old woman drove her car to the Valley Heights in Australia’s Blue Mountains where she parked up in a quiet street in a remote area where the incident took place, according to North South Wales police.
Emergency services were called to reports of three children and a woman suffering from alleged stab wounds in a vehicle on Waratah Road at Sunday around 12:45pm. Officers attended the scene and were told several members of the public had performed first aid on the casualties.
In a bedside court hearing on Tuesday, the as yet unnamed woman was charged with domestic violence-related murder and two domestic violence-related counts of cause wounding and grievous bodily harm to a person with the intent to murder.
She is said to have told her husband that they were going on a picnic while he was at work, according to Australia’s 7News.
The woman is alleged to have killed her five-year-old son and seriously wounded her two other children before turning the knife on herself. Her children were still strapped into their car seats at the time of the incident, according to local reports.
The white four-wheel drive she drove was found at the scene with its doors wide open.
The horrific incident was discovered by cyclists who raised the alarm and members of the public immediately rushed to help the family as emergency services were alerted.
After receiving a call at work, the father of the family was told that his son had died and that two other children remained in a critical condition in hospital.
Superintendent John Nelson said that the scene was “incredibly distressing” for members of the public to discover.
“When you’re using knives, or edged weapons... it’s actually quite barbaric,” said NSW police deputy commissioner Peter McKenna. “Whenever there is children, it doesn’t get worse than that.”
He added that there is currently no “rationale or reason as to why that was that location” and said that it will “form part of the investigation.”
Police said that the family were not local and added that they were not able to release further information due to the investigation being in its early stages.
“What I can say is that the wider family have not been contacted in relation to this matter, so out of respect for them, I’m not going to provide those details at this stage,” he said, according to Nine.
A source close to the family told the Daily Mail that the family had been left “shaken” by the ordeal. They said that the father remained at the bedside of the children and had been “taking care of the kids every day” since the incident.
According to the source, the father had moved from Kenya to Australia in 2013 after which he met his wife, also of Kenyan heritage.
A local resident, Julie Sakkar, relayed details from the scene and claimed that the children were found sitting quietly in the back of the car while the mother was seen “screaming” in bushes nearby.
“The children were quiet. They were not screaming or crying. They were not moving,” she told the Daily Mail. “That was hard to see. The police and the ambulance were here fast, and they did such a good job.”
Police said that all three remain in a critical but stable condition and have been taken to Westmead Hospital and Westmead Children’s Hospital.
The woman has been refused bail but will appear before Penrith Local Court on Friday 20 November.
It comes soon after the highly-publicised trial of American mother Lindsay Clancy who killed her three children Cora, five, Dawson, three and Callan, eight months, in 2023 before jumping from a window in an incident that left her paralysed from the waist down.
The case ended in a mistrial after jurors could not agree on defence claims she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings and was not criminally responsible.
