2014 case of a girl who was abused and killed by her parents
Known as the Chin Swee Road child death case, the charred skeletal remains of a 30-month-old girl, whose given name was Umaisyah (c. July or August 2011 – c. March 2014), were first discovered hidden and sealed inside one of the metal cooking pots from a flat in Chin Swee Road on 10 September 2019. After they uncovered the identity of Umaisyah's remains, the police found that her parents, who used to reside in the flat, were likely responsible for killing the girl five years before in March 2014. The cause of Umaisyah's death was due to her father slapping her on the face twice or thrice with great force, which resulted in a traumatic brain injury that led to a brain seizure, causing Umaisyah to die and her parents, who did not seek medical help for her, burnt the body to avoid detection of their daughter's murder and abuse and the father's drug use.
Upon the discovery of the girl's death in 2019, Umaisyah's parents, who themselves were in prison serving sentences or pending trial for unrelated offences since 2018, were both charged with murder. The victim and couple cannot be named due to the courts issuing a gag order in 2019 to protect the identities of their other children (who were still alive), although the gag order was partially lifted in 2023 to allow the media to report only Umaisyah's given name but other details like her own surname or her parents' identities are not revealed in the media.
Eventually, Umaisyah's father was found guilty of a reduced charge of manslaughter and three other charges unrelated to Umaisyah's killing in September 2023, and he was jailed for ;templatestyles src="Fraction/styles.css" / ;21+1⁄2 years with caning (18 strokes). Umaisyah's mother, who received a discharge not amounting to an acquittal for murdering Umaisyah, was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment in February 2024 on charges of abusing her children and perverting the course of justice.
Discovery of human remains.
Umaisyah's parents were previously convicted of drug offences and were imprisoned, leading to Umaisyah's siblings being taken care by relatives or social services. As a result Umaisyah's intellectually-disabled uncle lived alone in the family house.
On 10 September 2019, during one of the visitations by a friend who was taking care of Umaisyah's uncle, he opened a box inside the house out of curiosity and discovered the charred body of a child. Frightened by it, the man left the house leaving the box opened.
Unable to differentiate between edible food and the body, Umaisyah's uncle put the body into a metal cooking pot and started cooking it, resulting in a pungent smell which alerted the neighbours. The neighbours called the police, who arrived at the flat and impounded the metal cooking pot and the human remains as evidence, as they classified the case as one of unnatural death.
Investigations.
Through first-stage investigations, the police found that the human remains did not belong to a fetus, but it belonged to a girl aged approximately 30 months old, or equivalent to two years and six months of age. Her first name was reportedly Umaisyah. Her parents were the brother and sister-in-law of the man who found the corpse inside the kitchen, and it was further established that Umaisyah died five years prior in March 2014, and her parents, who had five more children, were likely responsible for her death, and had possibly burned the body in order to conceal her death.
According to police investigations, Umaisyah's parents, who themselves were already in prison charged with unrelated offences by September 2019, had lied to the social service agencies that the girl, whose birth was registered, was placed under the care of their relatives, even though there were confirmation that their other children were being taken care of by relatives, friends or social services. Their case was well known to the community agencies in the neighbourhood. On 9 September 2019, the day before the girl's corpse was found, Umaisyah's mother was sentenced to five years and two months' imprisonment for a total of four charges of drug-related offences and theft. The father was remanded since June 2018 for charges of rioting and consumption of methamphetamine.
Criminal charges.
On 16 September 2019, a week after the discovery of Umaisyah's skeleton, reports revealed that the girl's biological parents were arrested for their involvement in the case, now known as the "Chin Swee Road murder" case in the media. The parents and the girl were not named due to a court gag order issued to protect the identity of her surviving siblings. Under the law, the death penalty would be imposed in cases of offenders found guilty of murder. The authorities gave assurance that the victim's siblings were still safe and under stable care.
On 17 September 2019, the couple, who were both Singaporeans, were officially charged with murder at the State Courts for allegedly murdering their two-year-old daughter. Umaisyah's 31-year-old father, who was awaiting trial for the other three charges, was given a remand order on 24 September 2019 to undergo psychiatric evaluation for killing his daughter. Umaisyah's 30-year-old mother, who had already begun serving her sentence of five years and two months, was ordered on 1 October 2019 by the district judge to be remanded in Changi Prison's Complex Medical Centre for three weeks for psychiatric observation. The Attorney-General's Chambers warned members of the public to not breach the gag order, after some people published purported photographs of the girl's parents and family members, which amounted to a potential risk of identifying the victim or anyone related to her. Anyone who breached the gag order could be jailed up to a year, fined a maximum of S$5,000, or both.
On 5 February 2021, two years after the couple were charged with murder, the prosecution, having reviewed the evidence and case thoroughly, decided to apply for a discharge not amounting to an acquittal for Umaisyah's mother with respect to killing her daughter, meaning that the murder charge would be temporarily set aside, with the possibility to revive it should new evidence surface. Umaisyah's mother's lawyers objected to the prosecution's decision, as they sought a full acquittal of the murder charge, which would mean Umaisyah's mother cannot be prosecuted for the same offence again. On the other hand, the prosecution confirmed that they would proceed with the original murder charge against Umaisyah's father.
On 2 March 2021, Umaisyah's mother was granted a discharge not amounting to an acquittal for murdering her daughter. She, together with her husband, were also charged with 12 counts of having abused the victim and their other surviving children, perverting the course of justice, as well as giving false information to the social welfare agencies in relation to the girl's whereabouts. The mother was offered a S$80,000 bail in November 2021.
Trial of Umaisyah's father.
Plea of guilt and conviction.
On 19 September 2023, more than nine years after Umaisyah was murdered, and four years after he was arrested, Umaisyah's father, who by then divorced his wife, stood trial at the High Court for killing his daughter back in March 2014. After submitting a plea of guilt, Umaisyah's father was accordingly found guilty of one reduced charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder (equivalent to manslaughter) by causing Umaisyah's death and failing to seek medical attention for her. The accused also pleaded guilty to another three charges, consisting of one count of rioting, one count of drug consumption and one count of abusing his six-year-old stepson. Another five charges were consented by Umaisyah's father to be taken into consideration during sentencing.
In the midst of the man's trial, which took place on the same date, the court heard the full sequence of events that happened up till the killing, and the post-killing events prior to the 2019 discovery of Umaisyah's remains.
Account.
The following were the full sequence of events prior to, during and after Umaisyah's death, according to court documents and the media's coverage of Umaisyah's father's trial.
After her birth during that same year, Umaisyah was sent away in November 2011 to undergo foster care at the age of three or four months, after her father was imprisoned at a drug rehabilitation centre and her mother was deemed unsuitable as a caretaker of the girl. Umaisyah only reunited with her parents one year and six months after she was placed under foster care, but she was abused by her parents, who likewise neglected and mistreated their other five children, two of whom were a son (the same boy whom Umaisyah's father was found guilty of abusing) and daughter from Umaisyah's mother's first marriage. The six children (aged between two and nine in 2014) were also not given adequate food and water, and they were often left uncared for by their parents. Umaisyah was said to have been beaten frequently with a hanger or a belt by her father, who also punched her thigh or pinched her. When Umaisyah's foster mother came to visit the girl in July and August 2013, she noticed that the girl became withdrawn and less communicative, which was a result of Umaisyah's parents abusing her (a truth which Umaisyah's foster mother did not realize).
The exact date of Umaisyah's death in March 2014 remains unclear, but on that day, Umaisyah, then 30 months old, was caught playing with her faeces after soiling her diaper. Umaisyah's parents were upset at the sight of it, and Umaisyah's mother moved forward to slap her daughter on the cheeks and flicked her lips despite the girl's cries. Umaisyah's father, who had just consumed methamphetamine earlier that morning, slapped the girl on the face two to three times with great force, so much so that the girl bled from her nose and mouth, and gasped for air and could not walk. According to prosecutors, the slaps by Umaisyah's father likely resulted in a traumatic brain injury that caused Umaisyah to have a brain seizure. Despite Umaisyah's father attempting to resuscitate her multiple times, Umaisyah remained unresponsive. For fear that their acts of abuse and other acts of consuming drugs might get discovered, Umaisyah's parents remained silent and never sought medical attention despite the graveness of Umaisyah's injuries, and they left the girl to die.
Upon the death of Umaisyah, her parents placed her body in a metal pot and set her body on fire in the back of her father's lorry, and the corpse was fully burnt before the pot was placed in a box, which was sealed with masking tape and covered with cling wrap. The box itself was placed under the kitchen stove in their flat, and Umaisyah's parents even warned her maternal uncle to never touch the box, although at one point in 2017, he nearly threw the box away after finding it dirty and having cockroach eggs on the cling wrap, before Umaisyah's mother stopped him, and had the box freshly wrapped before putting it back below the kitchen stove, and warned her brother to not touch the box again. It was only after the sentencing of Umaisyah's mother in 2019 when her uncle finally uncovered his niece's remains and showed it to his sister's friends, who made a police report, which led to Umaisyah's death coming to light five years after it occurred.
Aside from this, Umaisyah's parents also made many lies and attempts to cover up their daughter's death. One instance was in December 2017, when the Ministry of Education (MOE) contacted her parents after finding that Umaisyah was not registered for Primary 1, the couple lied that they entrusted the girl to the care of her foster parents or the father's relatives in Melaka, Malaysia but had no idea of her whereabouts. Umaisyah's parents also drifted apart during these five years, and her father left their matrimonial home in 2017, and he no longer lived with his wife since then. Umaisyah's father was subsequently jailed at a drug rehabilitation centre for the second time, but he absconded in February 2018 before completing his sentence and he went on to commit an act of rioting while on the run, before he was arrested in April 2018 for the offence, and he even continued to consume methamphetamine while out on bail for the rioting charge, resulting in his arrest and remand in prison on 19 June 2018.
According to Dr Paul