“Papa, no!”

“Papa, no!”

“Papa, no!”

Those were the last words of 5-year-old Tulsi Amola in January last year after her father, Mukesh Prashad, instructed her to move from the back seat of their vehicle to the front passenger seat.

“Today we are both going to die,” Prashad would later recall telling his daughter in the empty carpark in the moments before he smothered her to death with a pillow.

His reason for doing so, he would tell police just hours later, was because he was convinced he had infected the child with herpes. He wanted to save her the pain and isolation of growing up with the virus, he said.

Murder defendant Mukesh Prashad appears in the High Court at Auckland in February 2025. Photo / Michael Craig

Details of the macabre scene were made public for the first time today as prosecutors in the High Court at Auckland gave their opening address for his murder trial.

Prashad, 38, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

But Crown prosecutor ‘Aminiasi Kefu said the first part of the trial will focus solely on whether it can be proven he killed his daughter and if he had murderous intent. To do so, he said, he’ll be relying on the defendant’s own words.

“He told police this was his plan and he did it intentionally,” Kefu said during his opening address.

“He was fully aware of what he was doing and he carried it out.”

At the time of the killing, Prashad had recently returned to his Takanini, South Auckland home to visit his wife and daughter over Christmas. He had earlier moved to Melbourne for work while his family remained in New Zealand. It’s in Australia, prosecutors allege, where he picked up the herpes virus.

On Christmas Day, the family went together to the Maraetai Beach and his daughter suffered numerous bug bites. He took the child to the doctor, suggesting that she had contracted herpes but not mentioning that he was infected. The GP insisted they were bug bites that had gotten infected because they were scratched, but the defendant was unconvinced, Kefu told jurors.

An autopsy would later confirm that the child never had herpes.

Prashad told police that, after deciding he needed to kill he daughter, he considered causing her to overdose on medication such as Pamol but settled on suffocation “because that was the lesser of the evils”.

He carried out the plan on January 5 last year, leaving the family home at around 8pm to pick up the child from a friend’s home. He smuggled a pillow outside the bedroom window so his wife wouldn’t see it, he said.

After retrieving the child, he parked in a quiet industrial area where he used to work and killed her, he said. Later that evening, he returned to the same area and walked into a nearby estuary - bashing his head with rocks in an attempt to kill himself.

“He obviously failed,” the prosecutor said.

Police examine murder defendant Mukesh Prashad's car after he parked in front of Manukau Police Station in the early hours of 6 January 2025 and reported that his 5-year-old daughter was deceased in the boot. Photo / Hayden Woodward

The defendant parked outside the Manukau Police Station after midnight and called 111.

“Hi there,” he said on the call, asking police to come outside. “Actually, I’ve killed my daughter and her body’s in the boot.”

Police who scrambled outside found him in the driver’s seat, muddy and with blood on him. He agreed to sit down for a recorded interview around 6am, after he had been treated at hospital for his own injuries.

Detectives would later review his internet activity, finding that in the days prior to the killing he had conducted Google searches about herpes, sleeping pills, Pamol and the police phone number.

Defence laywer Sharyn Green told jurors during her own opening statement that she would not dispute that her client is the person who killed the child. The main issue jurors will have to decide, she suggested, will be if her client was suffering a disease of the mind at the time of the killing to the extent that he didn’t understand what he was doing was wrong.

The defence will call one witness - a psychiatrist who interviewed the defendant three months after the incident - at the end of the trial, she predicted.

The Crown may call their own psychological expert to give a different opinion, but it will ultimately be up to jurors to decide if insanity has been proven, Green said.

The trial continues this afternoon before Justice Pheroze Jagose 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.