A mother accused of murdering her young daughter smoked a cigarette instead of calling 999 while her toddler lay dying, a court has heard.
Alexandra Walker, 25, and her boyfriend Harrison Simpson, 22, are on trial charged with murder, sexual assault, child cruelty, and allowing the death of a child.
The charges were laid following the death of Walker’s daughter Isabelle Welsh in September 2025.
Isabelle, who was just two years old, had suffered 21 broken bones in the weeks before she died, and was also the victim of sexual abuse, jurors at Teesside Crown Court have heard.
Richard Wright KC, prosecuting, said the day before Isabelle died from a severe head injury, the defendants had been up late drinking and smoking cannabis at their home in Thornaby, Teesside.
While Walker stayed in bed the following morning, Simpson was up and in sole care of the toddler, he said.
Walker later put Isabelle to bed and around 3pm on September 13, Simpson left the two-bedroom property.
Mr Wright said that within 10 minutes, Walker googled “Why would my toddler be bleeding”.
Internal CCTV from her home recorded her saying “You’re scaring me” and then she googled “what should I do if my child has blood in his stool”.
Around this time, Walker went into the kitchen to smoke a cigarette, jurors were told.
Mr Wright said: “It is absolutely obvious that by this time Isabelle is gravely ill.
“She is quite simply dying.
“And yet, despite the searches on Google, Alexandra Walker does nothing.”
Around an hour after Simpson left, Walker called her stepfather. He arrived at around 4.15pm and immediately told her to call 999.
Earlier that month, Walker had taken her daughter to hospital after Isabelle suffered a broken tibia. She had explained the injury to medics as Isabelle hurting herself by poking her leg through the cot.
Opening the case to the jury on Wednesday, Mr Wright said: “In due course you may want to consider why there was very significant delay in summoning the emergency services.
“One explanation of course is that Alexandra Walker knew that this time she would not be able to bluff and bluster her way out of the very difficult questions that she knew she would be asked at hospital.”
Paramedics arrived within a minute and Isabelle was rushed to hospital, but she died in the early hours of the next day.
Walker and Simpson were arrested. The mother said her boyfriend was her new partner, that they had been together for a month, and that she had raised concerns about bruises on Isabelle’s body but he had denied being responsible.
In a separate, later interview, she told police that she now realised Simpson had been abusing her daughter.
Simpson did not answer questions during interviews, Mr Wright said.
He told the court: “The prosecution will invite you to conclude that Alexandra Walker was telling lies and that Harrison Simpson said nothing because he had no answer at all to the questions that were being asked.
“They both knew exactly what had happened to Isabelle because in the weeks before her death they had each subjected her to violence culminating in the infliction of that terrible, fatal head injury.
“It would have been, we will invite you to conclude, perfectly obvious that child was being seriously assaulted on a regular basis.
“The failure to take her to hospital for days after her leg had been broken and the significant delay in calling 999 on the 13th is evidence of the fact that both were responsible for and aware of a series of violent assaults that they wanted to keep away from medical scrutiny if at all possible.”
The trial continues.
