Mum found not guilty after leaving baby to die as she suffered “forgotten baby syndrome”

By SHAUNA ANDERSON

“My baby’s gone. I can’t find her. I put her down for a sleep in her cot and she’s not there. Somebody’s taken her.”

These were the words Jayde Pool screamed down the phone to her sister on the night of December 11 2012.

A panicked phone call from the mother of a five-month old baby.

Imagine the terror. The gut churning horror that would seize your body.

She had been on the phone to a friend. She had settled herself outside with a cup of tea and a cigarette. Her two older kids had been fed and bathed.

It was a warm evening. The lead up to Christmas well underway.

She went to check on her baby, five-month old Bella.

Her cot was empty.

Her bottle was on the cupboard.

She wonders how did it get there. She runs to the phone and calls her sister. “Where’s Bella? Where’s Bella?”

“I put her down for a sleep and she’s not there,”

“Someone’s taken her.”

She called police. Minutes later they arrived and together the frantic search continued.

Tragically they then found baby Bella. She had been left in the car. Strapped to her car seat. She was now dead.

Jayde Poole from Bendigo is a single mother of three children. Baby Bella was five moths old when she died in her car seat. Another victim of “forgotten baby syndrome.”

Yesterday a Supreme Court jury found Jayde Poole aged 29 not guilty of manslaughter.

The night of Bella’s death Jayde Poole had driven a short distance to Hungry Jack’s to buy some takeaway food with Bella and her son, James aged 6.

The court heard that it was a drive she often did but this time it went wrong. Fatally, desperately wrong.

Bella was left in the car when the small family returned home. Left for two hours. It was 30 degrees that day in Bendigo.

Jayde testified that she believed Bella was asleep safe in her cot for those two hours. She never thought her daughter was in danger.

The court heard evidence from Professor David Diamond, an expert on memory from the University of South Florida. He testified that what Jayde experienced was termed ‘forgotten baby syndrome’.

The Age reports he said 200 children had died worldwide over the past 15 years from the phenomenon after being left behind in cars.

“What seems to be happening in this case and in so many other cases is that the brain actually seems to fill in the memory gap,” Professor Diamond said.

“What is very clear is that Jayde believed that Bella was safe and sleeping in her bedroom… the brain actually creates an alternative reality where the child must be safe.

“In those critical circumstances, having the sleep deprivation, being involved in some kind of routine, I believe any person is capable of forgetting a child in a car.”

He said a key difference that day was a slight change in routine – six-year old James was sitting in the front seat of the car – not the back where he usually sat.

The term has also been called “fatal distraction” and most recently has been used as a possible explanation for the death in the US of 22-month old Cooper Harris who was left his a car by his father, Justin Harris.

From The Age:

Professor Diamond told the court the short drive to and from Hungry Jack’s was one Ms Poole had done many times before so her dominant brain system, known as basal ganglia, would have put her in auto-pilot mode.

The court heard that what had changed on Thursday night, December 11, 2012, was that Bella was in the car on the drove to Hungry Jack’s, and that James was sitting in the front seat for the first time – he would usually sit in the back seat. ‘‘That particular evening was actually very complex, because the normal routine for Jayde would have been to have had Bella asleep that night,’’ Professor Diamond said.

‘‘I would speculate that at one level her brain is processing this information that at that time of the night, Bella should be in her bedroom sleeping … A second level that complicates this is that for the first time, as I understand it, James is now sitting in the front seat.

‘‘It makes it a very different situation and so Jayde’s attention is focused on James, and so you, in a sense, have competing memories of ‘Bella should be home in her bedroom, James is in the front seat.’’’

In his closing address Crown prosecutor Nicholas Papas, QC called for the jury to disregard this testimony.

He said the phenomenon was a theory not a proven medical condition.

He said in fact Jayde Poole was guilty of “gross negligence” and a breach of her duty of care as a parent by leaving Bella in the car.

‘‘This is a very unusual case, in that at this end of the Bar table we pretty much agree that Jayde Poole, the accused, up until the date when she left Bella Poole in the car, had lived a good life, a proper life, and had done her best to look after her children,’’ he said. ‘‘This is not about moral responsibility, this is about criminal responsibility. There is no question that she had a duty to look after her child.

‘‘The Crown says that that’s a very, very, high duty when it’s a young child. ‘‘How can a five or six-month old child survive without an attentive parent? Who’s going to feed it, who’s going to dress it, who’s going to take it inside, who’s going to take it outside, who’s going to give it warmth, who’s going to keep it cool.

‘‘Bella’s mother had that duty, the accused failed in that duty.’’

Defence barrister Shane Gardner however said it was a tragedy of a woman who forgot.

‘‘This is an accident for which she will exist in a living hell for the rest of her days.’’

‘‘No-one is more sorry for what happened than she is” he told the court.” and she will have to live with this for the rest of her lifetime, and I am sure you can imagine, but never really, truly know what that is like, unless you ultimately suffer that sort of loss yourself.’’