In One Swoop

Lifeless bodies of the children.

Accra, the Ghanaian capital was recently thrown into shock when a 32-year-old woman murdered her five kids
By McKnight Elabor, Accra
Penultimate Wednesday, January 6, 2010, 45-year-old Christian Kweku Asante, a businessman who lived at Sowutuom in Accra started the day like any other one: with no premonition of calamity to worry about. Apart from possibly bordering about how to send his children back to school after the long Christmas holiday. Since he parted ways with his wife, 32-year-old Georgina Tawiah who was said to suffer from occasional bouts of depression, Asante has been saddled with the upbringing of his five kids, while the wife comes to pick them from his place to spend time with her, especially on vacations as was the case on this occasion. But unknowingly to Asante, that would be the very last time he would see his kids alive.
With school about to reopen, Asante’s ex-wife, according to her family head, Kwame Donkor, called him on Monday, January 4, 2010 to come and pick the kids the next day. When he arrived the wife’s residence at Gomoa Nyanyano, near Kasoa in the Central Region where he formerly lived, Asante found the door locked. He knocked and called out to his elder kid, but there was no response. He then peeped through the cracks on the door and found his five children spread on the floor. Instantly, he broke into the room and to his surprise found all the kids lifeless and foaming from their mouths.
Asante’s hysterical scream attracted many curious persons who rushed to the location to find out the reason for the alarm. Further investigations revealed that their mother had given the kids namely, Kwaku 11, Nana Yaw 9, Angela 6, Koffi 4, Esi one-and-half years old bread, allegedly, soaked with parazone and fled. On seeing the abomination, the crowd went into a frantic search for the woman, even as the case was reported to the police. But their search proved abortive.
However, the next day, a woman was discovered lying unconsciously in an abandoned vehicle around Madina, Acrra and the police was subsequently alerted.
Addressing newsmen at the Police Hospital, Ebenezer Boryor, the Madina District Crime Officer, said that “the police was informed that there was a lady lying in an abandoned vehicle at a fitting shop at the Accra College of Education.”
He said the police, who suspected she might be the lady in question, confirmed her identity from pictures of her already published in the newspapers.
In her self-confined solitude where the police found her in the abandoned vehicle, Georgina was semi-conscious and had on her hand a suicide note. She was subsequently sent to the Police Hospital for medical treatment at about 9a.m.
On the suicide note, she had diligently scripted all her frustrations, thus: “I was born in December, 1977. I am alone in this world, God why, God why, I don’t have a mother or father, who am I. Georgina with three boys and two girls.
“My people deserted me, God give me hope, forgive me and my children, Nana, Kwaku, Angel, Kofi, Esi. What a painful world. God have mercy on me and my children. Why, Kojo my husband. Kojo, I do love you and will never forget you.”
The Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) in charge of Outpatients Department (OPD) at the hospital, Dr. Harold Agbenu, said the suspect was brought to the hospital weak and was examined. He stated that although she was in a stable condition, her blood pressure was a bit high, adding that “she just refused to talk”.
Meanwhile, investigations later revealed that Georgina was a ‘regular’ patient of Pantang Hospital, a psychiatric medical centre near Accra. According to the report, a medical assistant at the centre confirmed that the ‘killer mum’ was admitted there on at least three occasions and once at the Asylum Psychiatric Hospital in Accra.
She attended the hospital twice in August last year, but absconded in September. She was re-admitted in October but failed to come for a review schedule. Asante, however, claims that he was unaware of her mental status, adding that had he known, he would have done something about it for the sake of his children and their 12-year-old marriage. It was however confirmed by the hospital authorities that Georgina developed some mental disorders nine months after she delivered her second child, Angel.
Investigations also revealed that on two occasions she had attempted to kill her baby, Esi, with a knife, and when the last attempt failed, she had laid on a busy road with the child waiting for road users to drive over them.
Speaking further, her former husband said: “I loved my wife and she also loved me, but our marriage broke down due to her inability to organise the home.”
The pain he was going through was obvious as he asked rhetorically amidst sobs: “When am I going to get such children again?
“Georgina could not keep the home clean and at the least provocation, she reports me to the police. I have been behind bars several times because of her, but I did not know she was suffering mentally,” he said
As a result of the trouble-ridden marriage, Asante said, a policewoman advised them to live separately for a while and that was why they separated.
The bereaved man denied asking the deceased to leave his house anytime she came to visit the children as was claimed by some of her family members. He recalled that while attending to visitors in the home, the deceased had taken away the children, without saying a word to him about where she was taking them.
“They were playing outside in their home dresses and I would not have allowed her to take them away because they were improperly dressed, and also that she was unfit to take adequate care of them. I would have resisted had I not been taken unawares,” he said.
An eyewitness who gave her name as Dora told The Source that on Monday she saw Georgina took the kids to town and returned in the evening with them. “We did not see her again till Tuesday morning, around 11.00am when it was discovered that the children had been poisoned by their mother”, she said.
The suspect however died later of what was suspected to be the same substance that killed her children.
Instructively, this will not be the first time such an ugly incident is happening across the globe. Around 10:00am on June 20, 2001, Rusty Yates had received a startling phone call from his wife, Andrea, whom he had left only an hour earlier.
“You need to come home,” she said.
Puzzled, he asked, “What’s going on?”
She merely repeated her statement and then added, “It’s time. I did it.”
Not entirely sure what she meant but in light of her recent illness, he asked her to explain and she said. “It’s the children,” Andrea said.
A chill shot through him. “Which one?,” he asked.
“All of them.”
Yates dropped everything and left his job as a NASA engineer at the Johnson Space Center. When he arrived 15 minutes later, the police and ambulances were already at their Houston, Texas home on the corner of Beachcomber and Sea Lark in the Clear Lake area. Yates was told he could not go in, so he put his forehead against a brick wall, trying to process the horrifying news, and waited.
Restless for information, he went to a window and on to the back door where he screamed, “How could you do this?” According to an article in Time, at one point, Rusty Yates collapsed into a fetal position on the lawn, pounding the ground as he watched his wife being led away in handcuffs.
John Cannon, the police spokesperson, described for the media what the team had found.
On a double bed in a back master bedroom, four children were laid out beneath a sheet, clothed and soaking wet. All of them were dead, with their eyes wide open. In the bathtub, a young boy was submerged amid faeces and vomit floating on the surface. He looked to be the oldest and he was also dead.
In less than an hour that morning, five children had all been drowned, and the responding officers were deeply affected.
The children’s thin, bespectacled mother — the woman who had called 911 seeking help — appeared able to talk coherently, but her frumpy striped shirt and stringy brown hair were soaked. She let the officers in, told them without emotion that she had killed her children, and sat down while they checked. Detective Ed Mehl thought she seemed focused when he asked her questions. She told him she was a bad mother and expected to be punished.
Everyone who entered the Spanish-style home could see the little school desks in one room where the woman apparently home-schooled them. The house was cluttered and dirty, with used dishes sitting around in the kitchen. The bathroom was a mess.
While Andrea sat in a cell, Rusty Yates had to deal with a demanding media that not only wanted a scoop, but also wanted an answer on why any mother would murder all of her children? However, all five children were buried on June 28, 2001
According to the American Anthropological Association, more than 200 women kill their children in the United States of America (USA) each year. Three to five children a day are also killed by their parents.
Homicide, indeed, is one of the leading causes of death of children under age four, yet we continue to “persist with the unrealistic view that this is rare behavior,” says Jill Korbin, an expert on child abuse, who has studied mothers who killed their children.
“We should detach from the idea of universal motherhood as natural and see it as a social response,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, medical anthropologist said. Women in jail reported that no-one believed them when they said they wanted to kill their children. “There’s a collective denial even when mothers come right out and say, ‘I really shouldn’t be trusted with my kids.’”
A look at the rolls of women who are currently on death row, and the crimes that put them there, shows that women who kill their children are indeed not as rare as people would like to believe. Of the 49 women on death row during the study, 11 killed their children. A few samples.
Patricia Blackmon was 29-year-old when she killed her two-year-old adopted daughter in Dothan, AL in May, 1999.
Dora Luz Durenrostro killed her two daughters, aged four and nine and her son, aged eight, when she was 34-years-old in San Jacinto, California in 1994.
Caro Socorro was 42 when she killed her three sons, aged five, eight and 11, in Santa Rosa Valley, California in 1999.
Susan Eubanks murdered her four sons, aged 4, 6, 7 and 14, in San Marcos, California, in 1996 when she was 33.
Caroline Young was 49 in Haywood, California when she killed her four-year-old granddaughter and six-year-old grandson.
Robin Lee Row was 35 when she killed her husband, her 10-year-old son and her eight-year-old daughter in Boise, Idaho in 1992.
Frances Elaine Newton was 21 when she murdered her husband, seven-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter in Houston, Texas.
With the Accra murders, Georgina has put the city of gold into a global record blemished with blood.