Father of boy abused, neglected by his mother reunited with son after guilty pleas

After Daniel’s father tried to raise the alarm about his mother’s abuse for more than a month, it would take a hospital visit revealing multiple broken bones to finally spur police into action.

It was only after hospital staff reported Daniel’s injuries that Simon learned of Lisa’s chilling text messages. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

Looking back, the red flags were there from the start.

Not long after they were married, Simon’s wife Lisa* started biting him, pinching him — once so hard the resulting wound got infected and he was forced to attend hospital for treatment.

“She used to bite me so hard the scars would be there for weeks,” he says now.

Simon knew Lisa had had an abusive childhood, so he cut her some slack that, in hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have.

But it wasn’t until the couple took their then three-month-old son Daniel to hospital with a minor injury in 2019 that things took a darker turn.

Simon says hospital staff came to question the couple about how Daniel came to be injured but he didn’t think much of it at the time, only putting the pieces of the puzzle together much later.

After everything that would happen in the months that followed, he now says: “I feel like she did it, she did the same thing that she did to me”.

“Four weeks earlier, I came home one day after work, the baby was crying, like insanely, she was just on the phone on the bed and he was in the cot,” he says.

“She said ‘I don’t want him, it’s all yours, I don’t have any business with him, you’re the one who wanted to have him’, and she just left the room.

“That was the day I made him my first concern, until that day she was my first concern every time, because that’s how we grew up, my dad always looked after my mum.”

But the extent of his wife’s issues still hadn’t fully sunk in, and Simon was yet to understand the situation for what it was — domestic violence.

Up until then, Simon had been the main target of Lisa’s attacks, but ultimately, it would be Daniel who would come to suffer most at the hands of the woman who was supposed to protect him.

“(Back home) in our culture we don’t go against (our) wife,” he says.

“I didn’t realise, man I was so stupid, so dumb, I didn’t realise what she was doing.”

Lisa would soon come to control all the family’s finances, only permitting Simon small allowances to go grocery shopping, and insisting he pay back anything left over, before forcing him to sell his car while she pocketed the cash.

Then one day after he dropped Daniel at daycare, Lisa, after never showing any interest in collecting him before, came to pick him up while Simon was at work.

“(I thought) she’s just gone somewhere without telling me, she’s trying to make me angry or something, because she knows he’s everything to me, he’s my life and he’s the only way she can hurt me,” he says.

But by about 9pm, with no response to any of his calls or texts, Simon was starting to think the unthinkable and “was totally mildly breaking down myself”.

“I started crying,” he says.

“I was totally out of my mind.”

Simon ended up homeless with just $32 to his name. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

Finally, Simon managed to make contact with Lisa through her lawyers over the weekend and went to the legal aid offices first thing on Monday to try and resolve things.

But with the house leased in her name, he soon found himself homeless with just $32 in his pocket.

After spending a night on the streets, Simon managed to find accommodation with friends, before learning his wife was now living with their son in a women’s refuge and had taken out a domestic violence order against him.

By the end of September, Lisa, now living with her new boyfriend, with whom she would later share a dock in the Supreme Court, had been ordered to allow Simon to have video calls and visitations with his son.

On one such call, when he saw the little boy, crying, with swelling and an obvious friction burn to his forehead — her excuse was he fell and hit his head — Simon knew it was time to go to the police.

But his pleas, to both law enforcement and child protection services would all fall on deaf ears until more than a month later, on November 5, when Lisa and her boyfriend would finally take Daniel to hospital for treatment.

Doctors would discover he now had a broken leg, bruising to his face and a previously untreated broken collarbone that had “completely healed over” and which could have been inflicted around the time the boy’s father first raised the alarm.

Unbeknown to Simon, just days before he contacted police over his estranged wife’s treatment of Daniel, she had sent her new boyfriend a text saying “I smack him my hand is so painful”.

“I’m so angry with myself. I can’t control my anger. I was smacking sleeping (Daniel),” she wrote.

“(Daniel) is still awake. I smack him those canes. Still awake this boy. I don’t have patience to deal with him now. Sorry to disturb you.”

Now, with Daniel safely back home with him — the cheeky, smiley boy climbing all over the table as his dad as he tells his story — and Lisa and her boyfriend staring down a potentially lengthy prison sentence, Simon still wonders why it took so long to get help.

“I had to argue, I’m just crying and I’m telling them ‘Please do a welfare check, take him to the hospital’, they didn’t do it, they took three days to do a welfare check,” he says.

“On the fourth day they told me that ‘Oh yeah he’s doing fine’, I was like ‘That’s insane, look at him, he’s got burn marks, how is he OK?’.

“The lady from the Palmerston police station, I can still remember her face, she just asked me to leave the police station, ‘No, no, I don't want to see (the screenshots of the video chat), just go’, I was thrown out like trash so many times.

“Everyone believed all her lies, none of them believed me until he came to the hospital and in the hospital when they asked me to complain, I didn’t complain, I asked the surgeon to complain.”

A Darwin father reunited with his young son after the boy's mother pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court to failing to provide the necessities of life.Pic: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

In response to questions about Simon’s ordeal, a spokesman for Territory Families said all concerns of abuse were made to a central intake team through the child protection hotline and were “assessed by experienced intake officers”.

“(They) use a range of tools to assess whether the information meets the requirements of the Care and Protection of Children Act 2007 to proceed to investigation,” he said.

“If a matter does not progress to an investigation, the reasons for that decision are recorded against a child’s record.

“A matter may also be recorded as not progressing to investigation for other reasons, such as the child already having an open child protection case or initial inquiries show there are appropriate support services engaged with the family.”

While not commenting on Daniel’s case specifically, the spokesman said “all concerns reported about a child are documented”.

“This assists the department to build a history for a child that creates vital points of reference to inform future assessments when subsequent notifications are received,” he said.

A spokeswoman for domestic violence hotline 1800 RESPECT said “domestic and family violence can take a number of different forms”.

“It does not discriminate, and can happen to anyone, regardless of gender, country, religion, sexuality, socio-economic status, ability, age, or culture,” she said.

“While we cannot comment on individual cases, it is important that all reports of domestic, family, and sexual violence are taken seriously, and that people know that whatever your situation, there is help and support available.”

NT Police refused to comment on any of the issues raised in this article.

Lisa and her boyfriend each pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court in April to failing to provide the necessities of life and attempting to pervert the course of justice and will return to court later this month.

*All names have been changed.