A seriously ill mother has been found responsible for murdering her four-year-old son after drowning him in the bath as he begged her not to end his life.
Little Kingswealth Bayode yelled “mummy don’t kill me” moments before he died in the flat in Plumstead, south east London.
Paranoid schizophrenic Oluwakemi Badare, 37, told police that her son had pleaded for his life before she held him under the water, MyLondon reports.
Horrified paramedics found the boy naked in the hallway and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
His death came three years after his mentally unwell mum had told a nurse in 2017 that she had held her baby under the water for a minute.
Badare had denied murder but was deemed unfit to plead or to stand trial for murder and an alternative charge of manslaughter by gross negligence.
Instead, jurors were asked to consider whether she did the acts alleged, either than she drowned Kingswealth deliberately or that he died by accident.
Oluwakemi Badare, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, is “clearly very ill’
The four-year-old died at their flat in Plumstead, south east London (
Central News)
Following a trial of issue at the Old Bailey, she was found responsible for his murder by the jury. The jury at the Old Bailey deliberated for nearly nine hours to find that the defendant intentionally killed her son.
Judge Richard Marks QC adjourned sentencing in the case until July 20.
During the trial, prosecutor Duncan Atkinson QC said: “On December 27, 2020, the London Ambulance Service were called by this defendant to her address in Plumstead.
“She told the emergency operator that she had killed her son, and explained that she had drowned him. She also said that she had left him in the bath and forgotten about him.
“The paramedics attended. When they attended they found Kingswealth’s body at the top of the stairs outside the bathroom. His body was wet. The bathroom floor was wet. His death was the result of drowning.
“There was no natural disease that might have caused him to drown, but there were a number of scratches, bruises and skin defects about his head, neck and upper body consistent with pressure from fingernails and focal pressure to the head.
“This suggests that Kingswealth had been held under the water – and drowned deliberately.”
Paramedics had been alerted to the incident at 7.45am after Badare contacted emergency services and told the call handler that she had killed her son. She also told them she “want to do bubble bath” and had forgotten about him, as well as saying she had filled the tub with cold water.
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