A woman accused of murdering her three-year-old son beat him with a bamboo cane and said she was allowed to do so because the Bible told her to chastise him.
Christina Robinson, 30, also immersed her son in scalding hot water causing severe burns and shook him so violently that it resulted in brain damage, a court heard.
A jury was told the abuse took place while Robinson’s husband, Gabriel Adu-Appau, was away undergoing basic training in the RAF. While he was away she was also having an affair with a man she met on the internet and trying to conceive using a sperm donor.
Robinson has pleaded not guilty to a charge of murdering her son, Dwelaniyah, at the family home in Ushaw Moor, County Durham. She also denies a charge of child cruelty.
At the first day of her trial at Newcastle crown court Richard Wright KC, prosecuting, said Dwelaniyah died as a result of a head injury caused by violent shaking. His mother was sole carer at the time.
The court heard Robinson called an ambulance for her child on the afternoon of 5 November 2022, telling the operator that Dwelaniyah was not breathing and his eyes had gone weird.
Wright said Robinson told police who attended that Dwelaniyah had been eating a cheese bap when he suddenly became limp and collapsed. She said he did not chew and swallow his food well generally.
A postmortem revealed a number of issues including tramline bruising consistent with Dwelaniyah having been beaten with a cylindrical weapon.
A bamboo cane stained with the child’s blood and body tissue was recovered from the home.
Wright said: “The defendant now admits that she hit him with a weapon but says that she was allowed to do so because the Bible tells her that she should chastise her child.”
The boy also had a number of bandages on his lower body that Robinson said were the result of burning himself while messing about in the shower.
Wright said the “severe” and “terrible” burns on his legs, buttocks and genitals were actually a result of the boy being immersed in scalding hot water. “They would have caused him excruciating pain both when they were inflicted and afterwards when they were not properly treated or cared for,” he said.
The jury heard the burns were so serious surgery would have been required to treat them. They needed immediate attention and would have left him scarred for life.
Wright said it would have been patently obvious that the boy needed treatment but Robinson instead watched, every day, as he struggled in pain “with terrible burns bleeding through the bandages”.
He said the brain injury that led to the boy’s death was caused by forceful shaking, probably with an impact on to a surface.
Wright said the boy’s death was not an accident but “the end point in a series of violent and cruel acts perpetrated against him by his mother.
“She injured him, she neglected to treat the injuries she inflicted upon him and then she murdered him.”
While the abuse was going on and her husband was away, Wright said, Robinson was trying to become pregnant using a sperm donor, which was successful. She was also having a casual relationship with a man she met on the internet.
Wright pointed to Robinson’s assertion “that beating a child with a cane so that she drew blood was consistent with her being an adherent of the teachings of the Bible. The rules of the Bible are something of a movable feast for her.”
The trial is expected to last four weeks.
