Device stuck in boy’s throat: Maid’s sentence doubled after appeal

SINGAPORE — A foreign domestic worker who ill-treated her employer’s bedridden four-year-old son had her sentence doubled from four to eight months on Tuesday (April 25) after an appeal by prosecutors.

Kusrini Caslan Arja, 37, an Indonesian, was released from jail last month, having had her sentence backdated to the day she was first remanded in custody. Now, she will have to go back to prison again to serve a longer sentence.

In sentencing her, Judge of Appeal Tay Yong Kwang said she was not being punished for being ignorant or unskilled in caring for the boy, but for her “cold disregard” of the child’s safety and suffering. He also said her actions of letting a medical device remain stuck in the child’s throat for 12 hours and ignoring it was “unthinkable”.

“The poor child was endangered and had to undergo prolonged pain and senseless suffering”, he added, because Kusrini chose to remain silent and tried to hide the truth.

The domestic helper was hired to take care of the boy, who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy. His mother, a nurse, taught Kusrini to place a suction cap outside his nose and lips to remove his phlegm and mucus via a suction machine.

On Nov 23 last year, Kusrini noticed that the boy had more phlegm and mucus than usual and decided to put the 4cm-long cap into his mouth because she thought it was a faster and more effective way to clean up his respiratory tract.

When the cap fell into his mouth, Kusrini tried to fish it out with her finger, but failed. When blood started oozing from his mouth, she panicked and forcefully put her whole right hand in to retrieve the cap.

She did this repeatedly for about eight minutes, causing more bleeding. The boy’s head also turned reddish-purple and she sometimes had to stop digging to pump oxygen into his mouth, because the machine showed that his oxygen levels were low.

Near the boy’s bed was a surveillance camera, and the boy’s mother, who was viewing the footage on her mobile phone that morning, alerted her husband. However, Kusrini told her employers that there was “some blood” and everything was fine. The parents were unable to spot the blood stains because they were covered by a towel.

At about 9.15pm that day, the boy’s parents discovered that the pump container of the suction machine was filled with blood, and that his heart rate was high. Realising there was an object stuck inside his throat, the mother retrieved it with a pair of tweezers. The boy was admitted to KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital’s high dependency unit and discharged two days later.

Justice Tay said on Tuesday in his oral judgment that when Kusrini went against instructions to put the medical device in the boy’s mouth, “it was foolhardy”, but it could hardly be called a wicked act in the sense of intentionally inflicting harm.

However, her actions during those eight minutes — when there was profuse bleeding because of her method of retrieval — could be regarded as “unthinking, uncaring and unconcerned, and perhaps even unthinkable”.

Her “greatest culpability” was in not telling anyone about the incident or calling for help in the next 12 hours because “she was trying to hide her mistake”.

While Justice Tay observed that the district judge who gave her the initial sentence of four months “wrongly analysed the case in essence as someone being punished simply because she was not equipped for a particular task”, he disagreed with the prosecution that the domestic worker should receive the heavy penalty of at least 18 months’ jail.

He explained that this case is not as grave as previous ones where adult offenders wilfully and intentionally inflicted pain and suffering on child victims, “often out of anger or annoyance, and in some cases, for a sustained period”.