A domestic worker who killed a 2-year-old boy in her care has been committed to a mental hospital, with a judge agreeing she suffered from a serious mental illness when she strangled the young child.
Indian national Arshdeep Kaur, 24, claimed she felt possessed by spirits when she squeezed the neck of Ekamjot Singh in October 2016.
According to Apple Daily, Kaur was hired in March that year to care for the toddler at the family’s Tin Shui Wai home.
On the morning it occurred, Kaur said she woke up with heat emanating from her body, according to the SCMP. She entered the child’s bedroom and pressed her fingers against his throat.
After being unable to later wake the boy, Kaur became scared and switched off two cameras installed in the house by her employers.
Suspicious after the cameras stopped transmitting, the boy’s mother called a neighbor, who sent their domestic helper to investigate. When she arrived, the child was found unconscious.
According to on.cc, psychiatrists who assessed Kaur found she had been suffering from hallucinations and acute and transient psychosis when the killing took place.
She was charged with murder but last month pleaded guilty to manslaughter, as prosecutors accepted her judgement was severely affected by her mental state at the time.
In mitigation, her defence team noted Kaur was from a poor family in India and had dropped out of a civil engineering course due to a lack of funds after her mother died.
Sentencing, the judge said the defendant’s actions were “terrible” and would haunt her forever but added, based medical experts’ reports, indefinite hospitalization at the Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre in Tuen Mun was the best course of action — both for her treatment and public safety.
According to the SCMP, the hospital order requires approval from her doctors and the city’s chief executive before the defendant can be released.
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