By The Guardian (World News) | Created at 2024-10-25 16:25:17 | Updated at 2024-10-25 18:26:13
2 hours ago
A woman who stabbed her sleeping daughter 11 times in the chest because she believed they were being targeted by “tech and lasers” has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.
Jaskirat Kaur, 33, called 999 hours after she had killed 10-year-old Shay Kang with a Swiss army knife at their home in Rowley Regis, West Midlands, in March.
When police arrived, Kaur told them there were “projections coming in and out” of their home with “tech and lasers and stuff”, adding: “It was me [who killed her] because I didn’t want her getting took by it.”
Kaur told officers she had wanted to kill her daughter for the past seven months. “They can’t take her. I was worried about Shay growing up. I would kill her again. I wanted her to die, I don’t regret it,” she said.
She showed no emotion in the dock at Wolverhampton crown court on Friday as Judge Chambers KC sentenced her. Kaur pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility in August.
Chambers said: “This is a truly dreadful and tragic loss of life. The enormity of what you have done is difficult to comprehend. What you have done has impacted many lives and the community rightly have been shocked.
“The conditions in which she lived and the context in which she died were the direct result of your severe mental illness. It led to you both living a socially isolated existence.”
The prosecutor Sally Howes KC told the court concerns had been raised about Shay’s welfare when she failed to attend Brickhouse primary school for nine months between December 2022 and September 2023.
Police visited the family home on a number of occasions and noted that Kaur appeared to be suffering from paranoia. In January 2023, she told officers she was not sending her daughter to school because a “male was going to take her from there”.
Social workers carried out an assessment on 27 September last year in which they said Shay did not speak, looked “relatively healthy but pale” and her arm movements were “stilted and robotic”, while Kaur was said to be paranoid and anxious. By November, they said Shay’s speech had regressed to babbling.
Shay returned to school in January and told staff that when she was at home she and her mother spent their time in separate rooms and “did nothing and went nowhere”.
Two forensic psychiatrists determined that Kaur had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when she carried out the fatal attack on her daughter.
Carla Newby, Brickhouse school’s pastoral officer, said: “Shay was always a bright, happy, fun-loving child who was well liked by all. Her smile could brighten up the dimmest of days.
“This is the most horrific and devastating situation we have ever had to manage. We spent time with Shay as she rested in the funeral home. We placed a pink blanket and a teddy bear in her coffin for her to snuggle.”
Katherine Goddard KC, defending, said Kaur’s mental condition was “deep-seated and long term, with no guarantee of future improvement”.
“She has received no visits except for her legal team, and received no letters and no one has tried to contact her in any way,” she said. “This represents the bleak sadness of the future that this defendant faces.”
