An 8-month-old girl who died after arriving unresponsive at a South Auckland clinic two years ago had suffered multiple “atypical” injuries consistent with “ongoing abuse”, medical experts said today at her father’s murder trial.

“These injuries are very rare and usually seen if someone is punched very hard or stomped on,” Dr Kilak Kesha, who performed a post-mortem exam of the child, said of the baby’s severe abdominal injuries as jurors in the High Court at Auckland were handed a photo booklet highlighting multiple areas of the child’s lifeless, battered body.

Neither the child nor her father can yet be identified due to ongoing name suppression for the 26-year-old defendant, who has been on trial since last week.

The defendant acknowledged through his lawyers at the outset of the trial that he had done something unforgivable - punching his baby in the stomach about four times after losing his patience. Jurors today rewatched a snippet of a police interview in which he stood up and demonstrated what appeared to be forceful punches and hard slaps while simultaneously cradling the child’s neck.

“I’ve sinned,” he told police. “I’ve murdered my daughter.”

But he didn’t think the blows would result in his daughter’s death, his lawyers have said, suggesting that their client never had murderous intent. The child’s mother could have been responsible for some of the child’s many other injuries, the defence also suggested.

Dr Kesha, the pathologist, determined that the baby died as a result of blunt force trauma to her abdomen, causing her bowel to rupture and a fatal infection.

He outlined fractures to the child’s skull, hand, ribs and femur, as well as many bruises to spots considered unusual for a child of her age including her abdomen, both cheeks, the inside of her elbow and the back of her thigh.

“Without a history of a traumatic event like a car accident, these injuries are consistent with ongoing abuse,” he said.

Paediatric medical expert Dr Juliet Soper shared a similar assessment with jurors.

“I thought all of her bruises were very atypical for a child of her age,” the witness said, adding that the abdominal bruises were “simply not seen in typical children of this age”.

Some of the injuries might have possibly been the result of an accident such as falling off a bed, being rolled on to while co-sleeping with her mum or while receiving CPR, but not all of them could be explained that way, both experts said.

“Her injuries were at different stages of healing,” Soper said. “The constellation of injuries are indicative to me of multiple episodes of trauma. In my opinion, [she] experienced child maltreatment.”

Earlier today, jurors heard from the child’s mother, who had been testifying since Friday via audio-video feed from another part of the courthouse so she wouldn’t have to be in the same room as the defendant. The woman, who spoke through an interpreter and also had a communications assistant by her side, often gave one-word answers as she was cross-examined by the defence.

The lawyers played a brief video of the woman smacking her pre-school-age older child with a TV remote control, telling the sobbing child, “Stop crying. You can see that your father doesn’t love you.”

She admitted that she would “assault” and pinch both children out of anger, but none of those occasions were recent enough to have been at their current address at the time of the baby’s death, she said. The bruises on her daughter’s cheek would not have been caused by her pinching, although she did sometimes pinch her children’s cheeks, legs and hands, she said.

On the day of her daughter’s death in May 2022, the mum is alleged to have woken up realising she had rolled on top of the baby while sleeping although she now says she cannot remember. But that morning the child was “happy, running around, playing and watching TV”, she told police at the time. Her child seemed to have a fever, perhaps like she had a cold or flu, but was otherwise her normal self, she agreed today.

She texted a friend just after 4pm that day: “Well I want to take my dear child to the hospital. It seems like something is not right.” The friend recommended she take the child to “the old lady” - a reference to a traditional healer - but when she did so the woman told the mum the child instead needed medical attention.

She went back home instead but the child was taken to Watford Medical Centre in Ōtara around 9.30 that night. By then she was lifeless and couldn’t be revived by CPR, prosecutors have said.

Given her injuries it would have been “very obvious” that the child was “in an urgent condition” by 7pm that day, the pathologist testified.

“I’d expect the child would have been in some kind of distress,” Dr Kesha said.

The trial is set to continue tomorrow before Justice Laura O’Gorman and the jury.

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.