Murder-accused mum filmed video as girl lay dying

Warning: This story contains distressing details

A mother accused of murdering her one-year-old daughter recorded videos pleading with the child to wake up after she suffered fatal injuries, a court has heard.

Jurors were shown footage recorded by Kinga Wydrzynska in the early hours of 7 January 2025, before emergency services were called to the family home in Rugby, Warwickshire.

Prosecutors say Isabella Stasiak died from a traumatic head injury and suffered multiple other injuries.

Wydrzynska, 26, denies murder. She and Isabella's father, Michal Stasiak, 28, also deny causing or allowing the death of a child, four counts of causing or allowing serious physical harm, two counts of sexual assault by penetration and three of child cruelty.

At the Warwickshire Justice Centre on Wednesday, the jury was shown two videos Wydrzynska recorded with her daughter after what prosecutors say was the fatal injury.

In the footage, which was later deleted from her phone, Wydrzynska is seen crying and pleading with Isabella, who is not moving in the video, to wake up and breathe.

"I didn't want it to turn out like this," she is recorded saying in Polish in the first video. "She was swollen in the face.

"Her eyes were shut for seven days because they were scalded."

The court previously heard Wydrzynska was the only adult present in the house when the fatal injuries were inflicted.

Jurors were told she called Stasiak, who was no longer living with his former partner, before recording a second video showing Isabella lying limp in her arms.

Members of the public gallery were in tears as the footage was played.

Prosecutor Annabel Darlow KC asked the jury why Wydrzynska had later deleted the videos from her phone.

In one recording, Wydrzynska was heard asking her daughter: "Why aren't you moving? Now I'll be blamed."

Medical experts found Isabella died from a "traumatic head injury" caused by a "blunt force impact to the head", the court heard.

Darlow said the child had suffered a number of injuries from separate incidents, including a complex skull fracture, haemorrhage, a broken right arm, multiple bruises and injuries to her genital area.

Isabella was also found to have more than a dozen fractures across eight ribs, with the prosecutor saying they were of different ages and there was no history of accidents to explain them.

The court heard she had also sustained a burn to her face which experts said was likely inflicted between four and seven days before her death.

During police interviews, Wydrzynska said Isabella had crawled towards bath taps while her attention was elsewhere and burned herself with hot water.

One burns and trauma expert said it was conceivable the injury was consistent with a child placing her face beneath running hot water.

However, Darlow said medical experts disagreed over whether the burn was accidental or deliberate.

She told the jury: "She would not have been able to turn on the tap herself. She would not have been able to move by herself from one end of the bath to the other."

Isabella was taken to hospital after emergency services were called on 7 January 2025, but was later pronounced dead at University Hospital Coventry.

The trial, at Warwickshire Justice Centre, is expected to last three months and continues.

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