Mommy, Don't Hurt Me -- by Anne Shier

(Inspired by an article in the Toronto Sun, September 2007.)

The death of a child is always accompanied by many unanswered questions. This is one of those things in life that people find so difficult to accept and understand. I know I do. And it is really hard to understand why an innocent child like Lara had to die in such a horrible way—by her own mother’s hand. As a result, Lara’s mother, Sasha, was charged with the second-degree murder of her young daughter, and her life would be changed forever.

Sasha’s family broke down in utter despair outside the Downsview, Ontario, suburban home where 3-year-old Lara’s body was discovered. Sasha and Lara had been living in the basement apartment that Sasha had rented there. The day after Lara’s body was found, Sasha’s father, brother and sister all came to the semi-detached house located in the northwest part of the city. Her grandfather collapsed on the front lawn and, curled up in a fetal position, moaned and rocked back and forth in grief. The brother staggered out onto the street in front of his sister’s home and fell to the pavement in tears. The family embraced as they finally returned to the vehicle that had brought them to the crime scene. The brother was still crying as they pulled away.

The neighbours were shocked at this turn of events in their neighbourhood. It was a very quiet place and had been like that for the last 20 or 25 years. None of them had ever witnessed this kind of violence. They had seen the little girl on occasion, though they commented to police that they rarely saw her playing outside. Whenever they did see her, she was being carried to the car by her mother. They couldn’t help wondering why they’d never known what was really happening to Lara. It was only when her death became front-page news that the neighbours suddenly started to wonder. There were never any children’s toys outside, and Sasha had not been close to any of her neighbours. They basically knew next to nothing about Sasha or her young daughter. All that was about to change.

Lara had only really been close to one person in her mother’s family—her aunt Maria, who had come to visit several times. Sasha apparently had only been in contact with her younger sister on a regular basis, but not with the rest of the family. That was another mystery to which no one knew the answer. Of all the members of Sasha’s family, Maria was the one who was truly the most shocked and grief-stricken by Lara’s death, despite the outward demonstrations of grief displayed by her other family members. It seemed that Maria was the only one Sasha had felt comfortable talking with about her life as a struggling single mother. Conversely, Sasha’s parents seemed to blame her for all of her own personal and financial misfortunes and did not support her in any way. Thus, Sasha found herself largely on her own while raising Lara, with no external support system.

A week or two before the tragedy, Maria had had a vivid nightmare about Lara. She had dreamt that Sasha had gotten very angry with Lara and had then hurt her by burning her hand with a lit cigarette. In her dream, Lara would cry and plead tearfully, “Mummy, please don’t hurt me. Don’t be angry with me. I just wanted to have some fun with my toys. I’ll clean up the mess I made.”

Then Sasha, feeling remorseful for what she had just done, would tell Lara, “I was not trying to stop you from playing with your toys. I want you to stop getting on my nerves with your incessant talking to your baby dolls. Mummy’s very nervous right now because sometimes parents have big problems to deal with that their little kids don’t understand. Just leave me alone for a while.”

A year ago, Maria had had a similar nightmare. That particular time, she had dreamt that Lara had taken something of Sasha’s that Sasha did not want her to have—a pink lipstick. Lara had only wanted to play with it. She liked playing “grownup,” but in doing so had angered Sasha, who had then hurt Lara by screaming at her and then beating her behind with a wooden spoon. Lara cried for a long time after that beating, and Sasha could not calm her down for quite a while. Lara again pleaded with her mother, “Mummy, please don’t hurt me. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to take your pink lipstick. I just wanted to play at being a big girl.”

One couple drove to the house carrying a photograph that they had taken of a smiling 3-year-old girl whom they had met in a shoe store at nearby Sunnyside Plaza. They had taken the photo of this pretty little girl, all dressed up in pink, as she had laughed while trying on a pair of red women’s high heels in the shoe store. Lara had even given their little niece a warm hug. When the couple later heard about her untimely death, they drove by the house wondering if the girl in the photo was the same lifeless child that they’d heard about on the news. At the same time, they wondered why they had never heard back from the mother, even though they had mailed a copy of the photo to her for a keepsake.

One of the neighbours, while later talking to police about Lara, said that he thought he kept hearing a child crying. He could never pin down the location the crying was coming from because it was so faint, but he now felt certain that Lara was the one who had been crying. He didn’t know why she’d been crying so much, but he was curious that a child that he hardly ever saw always seemed to be so miserable. There was never any overt evidence of child abuse or mistreatment of any kind, nothing that he could call “a red flag” and, thus, be able to call the police and lodge an official complaint. He didn’t know Sasha well enough to be able to say that she was the one who was causing it.

At Lara’s funeral four days later, Sasha was absent (due to being remanded for Lara’s murder), but the rest of Sasha’s family was there, and so were most of the neighbours.

Maria, in her eulogy, said, “Lara was such an innocent young child—a victim in a society in which neighbours are strangers and no one really cares what happens to its children until a single mother, desperate, lonely and badly needing emotional and financial support, can no longer keep her own child safe in her own home. In fact, Sasha herself is a victim of this same society in which it is easier to lay the blame for Lara being a victim of violence at her mother’s doorstep. But the reality is much more complicated than appearances indicate. We are all to blame for Lara’s death because until we acknowledge that single mothers are also society’s victims, other children can become victims of their parent’s frustration and rage if these parents don’t get the support they need from other people around them—their families, neighbours and other parents.”

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA