A father has told a murder trial jury that he swung his infant son's head against a kitchen wall two or three times "like someone possessed" because a voice came inside his head and told him to do it.
The accused told his trial that he could not believe the person that he was at the time he killed his son. He was "ill", "living in another world" and "like a zombie", he said. The jury heard that the man, Mr Yusif Ali Abdi, was transferred to the Central Mentral Hospital six months after he was remanded in custody for the murder, and that he has been on anti-psychotic drugs since.
Mr Yusif Ali Abdi (30), a refugee from Somalia, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of the murder of his 20-month-old son, Nathan Baraka Andrew Ali on 17th April 2001 in an apartment at The Elms, College Road, Clane, Co Kildare.
A post-mortem showed that baby Nathan Ali died from massive damage to the brain, with skull fractures resulting from multiple impacts with a hard surface.
Mr Ali Abdi gave evidence to the jury in the presence of his wife, Ms Amanda Bailey and her parents and family in the Central Criminal Court. Mr Justice Carney adjourned the trial early as he said the Baileys were "manifestly upset" at the evidence.
Mr Abdi agreed with his counsel that he had had "bad experiences" in Somalia. He said this caused him sometimes to have images in his head. At first it was when he lay asleep, but later, it would happen in daytime also. He would see "faces" coming at him, talking in his first language, Bajuni, he said. The "faces" were "people from the past", he said. "It's like the repeat of what was happening to me was coming back to me", he said.
He said he also suffered from stomach pains and was seen by the Infectious Diseases Department in the Mater Hospital. Doctors there found no physical basis for the pain. He was eventually seen by the hospital's psychiatric department in 1998. They thought he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but they did not tell him, he agreed with counsel. He took medication, but the "flashbacks" and "noises inside the head" continued. The medical staff considered him for counselling, but he did not get any.
On 13th November 1999, he said, he was arrested for obstructing traffic and assaulting a garda when he was stopped by gardai as he and a friend were crossing the North Circular Road. Mr Ali Abdi said he was "pushed around" by the gardai but a District Court judge did not believe his account. After that, he said, he started to believe the gardai were following him and were planning to kill him. He also started to think his phone was tapped, that there was a video camera trained on his apartment and that his wife, Ms Bailey, was trying to poison him by adding Red Devil stain removers to his food. He believed at the time that red was the colour of evil, he said, "because it's related to blood."
Even though he had by this time got refugee status, he believed his wife was trying to deport him, he agreed. "There was no rationality in my head."
He had been given 100 hours community service, and when he was carrying it out in the Clonskeagh mosque, he began to observe the prayer routines again, and later began to do additional prayers, including one that involved getting up at 4 a.m. daily.
Things got to the stage in his relationship with Amanda where she and Nathan were staying with her parents most of the time. On Easter Monday 2001, she came to visit with Nathan. He might have taken one anti-depressant tablet before she came, the accused said.
Amanda went to bed sometime around 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. At that stage, he was sleeping every night in the living room, the accused said, because he was "scared" someone would come into the bedroom. He also kept the living room door locked.
At 4 a.m., he awoke for his prayers, and as he was going to prepare for them, he saw the bedroom door open. "All of a sudden, I had a feeling", he said, "Someone came up inside my head and said, 'Take him, take him'." The voice spoke Bajun, he said. He went inside and took his son and brought him into the living room, locking the door behind him.
"At the time I was just, I don't know, like a zombie, or possessed or something like that", he told Mr O'Connell. "It was like a different land, a completely different land.
"I felt like my brain was taken out and nearly somebody else's brain was put inside mine, because that's not me at all."
He said he was in the living room, standing there, and the voice told him, 'Hit him, hit him'. "And just like the same way, I was like someone who was possessed I went and hit him on the wall. I hit him two or three times and I was still in that state."
Nathan was not moving and he put him on the floor, the accused said. He then decided to pray. "I guess I realized what had happened and the only thing I could think of was to do a prayer, maybe he would wake up or something", he said.
Mr Ali Abdi agreed that he had tried to harm himself early on when he was remanded in custody by hitting his head against a wall. He said he did not want life anymore.
He agreed that he did not at first tell the psychiatrist treating him, Dr Kennedy about the images he used to have or the "voices" he had heard. His counsel said that in any case, there was evidence that, early on during his remand in Clover Hill prison, he mentioned the voices to one of the psychiatrists who saw him.
Mr Ali Abdi told Mr Tom O'Connell SC that he fled Kismayo on the eastern coast of Somalia after civil war erupted there in 1990. His father and stepmother had been shot dead and his family home burned. His two sisters and brother had also fled and he did not know where they were. He stayed for four-to-five years in the Utange refugee camp near Mombassa, Kenya. In the camp, he was targeted "several times" and beaten up by members of other tribes. He was stabbed twice.
The UN closed the camp down in 1995, due to the fighting going on there. Mr Ali Abdi said a friend of his father's then put him in touch with an agent, who for $500, got him on a cargo ship that ended up in Waterford.
He was initially refused asylum but won his case on appeal. He met Ms Amanda Bailey in May 1998 and married her a year later. Their son Nathan was born in August 1999.
Mr O'Connell SC earlier told the jury that the defence would seek to prove a case of insanity and would show that Mr Abdi suffered from "command voice hallucinations" at the time of the killing. When his killed his son, "he acted as a result of an irresistible impulse caused by a disease of the mind", the defence counsel argued.
The trial continues tomorrow before a jury and Mr Justice Carney.