A three-month-old baby died a rather depressing death — her father had been so engrossed by a football game on his mobile phone that he didn’t even notice his daughter thrashing in distress as he fed her milk from a bottle.
27-year-old Mohamed Shiddiq Sazali may have caused his own daughter’s demise, it seems. A coroner’s inquiry revealed that little Reyhana Qailah might have choked to death while being bottle-fed, and that her father could have prevented it if he wasn’t so fixated by his phone, The New Paper reported.
On the morning of Oct 12 last year, Shiddiq was alone at the family’s flat in Telok Blangah Crescent, feeding his child while simultaneously playing the game. Investigations revealed that he did not realise the infant had been thrashing about for two minutes before becoming motionless.
It was only when the baby’s grandfather walked in that she was noticed to be pale and unresponsive.
Shiddiq was unable to tell his father-in-law what happened. An ambulance was called and CPR was performed on Reyhana, who vomited out milk. Reyhana’s mother — who was at Clementi police division for a urine test — was told to come home straightaway.
Further attempts by a policeman and a paramedic to resuscitate Reyhana was for naught — she was pronounced dead around noon at Singapore General Hospital.
This wasn’t the first incident where Reyhana was injured due to her father’s carelessness — investigations revealed that Shiddiq had accidentally dropped his daughter at the void deck in August last year. Again, he had been distracted by his mobile phone and dropped Reyhana on her head when he tried to pick up her pacifier on the ground.
Doctors at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital said she had a fractured skull from the incident. The baby was also found to have suffered fractures to her right ribs, which remain unexplained.
A pathologist report, however, reported that the fractures would not have caused or contributed her death as Reyhana died due to “cardiorespiratory failure pending further investigations”. For now, the official cause of death is unconfirmed, but suffocation and choking on milk is a possible cause.
