Baby murders: Their mother’s online bid for sympathy
The murder-accused mother called her firstborn "our lives, our 24 hours a day" in a blog post nearly a year after Alaia's death.
In a blog post understood to have been written by baby murder-accused mother Stacey-Lee van der Ross, 29, she claims to have been wrongfully accused of “shaking” her baby.
The blog post to tumblr, published on 2 August 2013 (almost a year after first baby Alaia’s death) sports the nonsensical title, “Shaken baby syndrome… Real or are people hiding something?”
In the post, Stacey-Lee tells the story of her firstborn Alaia that was born in May 2012 and was always “crabby” after receiving vaccinations at a clinic.
Stacey-Lee and her partner Junaid Adam-Shaik stand accused of severely harming Alaia since her birth on 11 May to her death on 12 October 2012. They face two charges of murder, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm and child abuse, but disappeared off the grid days before their trial was due to start on 23 February in the Johannesburg High Court. They are still missing.
“Does anyone kow what shaken baby syndrome is?” she wrote and added, “Neither did I, well at least until we got accused of it.”
Of Alaia, she wrote “she became our lives, our 24 hours a day”.
“If she wasn’t feeling too grand we were all too happy to stay at home so that she would be comfortable… she was our life now, our everything.”
It seems that the accused mother blamed harshly administered vaccine injections, at least in part, for her firstborn’s death.
“What we did notice is that every time they jabbed her, or should I say stabbed her.
“That’s what it looked like; after such excessive force her leg would swell up and get hard, not for days, for weeks.”
In the post Stacey-Lee mentions a video that she took of her daughter at 5 months of age, which she describes as “the last video I would take of our precious baby”.
It is not certain whether this family video is in evidence regarding the pending trial. The day after the video was taken, she describes her daughter’s symptoms as not wanting to eat, having a fever, gasping for air and collapsing, not breathing and finally, vomiting.
According to her post, Junaid helped her and they tried to administer CPR to the gasping, vomiting child without success. They rushed her to a hospital where doctors resuscitated her. Alaia was admitted to the NICU and a CT scan and X-rays were taken. She reports that a doctor told them, “your baby has blood on her brain and fractures on her long bones [sic].”
“It looks like your baby was shaken,” the doctor allegedly told the young couple.
A neurosurgeon apparently said to her, “she’s not going to wake up, she’s not going to make it”.
The post is written alluding to a next post in the near future, but no further posts were made. It is also written to have the reader understand that the story is not over, although Alaia died nearly a full year prior to its publication.
Related article:
Couple still MIA after second murder charge
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