Man sentenced to 11 years for abusing toddler stepdaughter to death in southern Taiwan

南台灣虐待年幼繼女致死，男子被判11年

An autopsy has found that the little girl died of brain injury and intracerebral hemorrhage before arriving at the hospital


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Pingtung District Court on Friday (April 15) sentenced a man to 11 years in prison for physically abusing his three-year-old stepdaughter to death in June last year.

The toddler’s mother, surnamed Huang (黃), was raising her daughter alone before marrying a man surnamed Fang (方). The three began to live together in a rented house in Pingtung County’s Fangliao Township in June 2020.

According to the sentencing document, the little girl, also surnamed Huang, fractured her right thigh from a fall at home in March 2021, which required her to have her thigh in a cast. As she couldn’t walk, she had to move by sitting and sliding her buttocks forward.

Fang told his stepdaughter that she had to stay in a room and was not allowed to go to other areas of the house, according to the document. From June 8 – 10 in 2021, when the child left the room in which she was confined, Fang used a coat hanger, a mop handle, or a belt to hit her in the head, face, torso, and limbs during the three-day period, causing her to have large areas of bruises and injuries all over her body.

On the night of June 10, Fang found that the toddler had lost consciousness and was having shortness of breath and fever. He told his wife about the child’s conditions. The mother immediately called for an ambulance to send her daughter to Fangliao General Hospital. However, the child suffered out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and died of brain injury and intracerebral hemorrhage before arriving at the hospital, according to her autopsy.

Fang persuaded his wife to tell police and prosecutors that the girl died from falling down stairs, the sentencing document states. However, the child’s mother grew unwilling to shoulder the responsibility of lying to defend the murderer of her own daughter and confessed to the police what really happened, according to the court document.

Considering that even though Fang denied abusing the toddler during the investigation, during the trial he admitted his guilt and expressed remorse for what he had done to the child, as well as other extenuating circumstances such as he comes from a broken home and has two underage children from the previous marriage who are being cared for by their grandparents, the Pingtung District Court sentenced him to 11 years. His sentence can be appealed.