A woman who killed three of her children by deliberately driving her car into a lake has been jailed for 26 years and six months.
Akon Guode, 37, cried through much of her sentence in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, as she was jailed over the deaths of four-year-old twins Hanger and Madit and 16-month-old Bol, who drowned when Guode drove her car into Lake Gladman in Wyndham Vale on April 8, 2015.
Guode must serve a minimum 20 years in prison before she is eligible for parole. She is likely to be deported on release.
A fourth child, now seven, was also in the car but was rescued and survived.
The lake was a scene of chaos that afternoon as firefighters, residents and ambulance paramedics tried to rescue the children. Guode stood by and did not help.
Guode pleaded guilty to two counts of murder, one of infanticide and one of attempted murder.
The charge of infanticide applies to women who kill their children (younger than two years) in instances where the mother is affected by mental-health problems related to childbirth. Guode’s plea to infanticide relates to Bol’s death.
Justice Lex Lasry described the case as a tragedy, where Guode’s children were entitled to trust their mother to keep them safe. Their deaths constituted a “horrendous crime”, he said, and were difficult for the community to fathom.
“Your betrayal of their trust was catastrophic,” Justice Lasry told Guode.
But the judge acknowledged Guode’s frail mental health when she killed her children, given the emotional pressures she was under as a mother of seven who had come to Australia as a refugee from war-torn Sudan, where her first husband was murdered.
The court heard Guode, who came to Australia with her three eldest children as refugees, had experienced declining mental health since Bol’s birth, when the mother lost a lot of blood. She was also financially stricken and ostracised from Melbourne’s Sudanese community because of her affair with married man Joseph Manyang, the father of Guode’s four youngest children.
Justice Lasry said the loss Mr Manyang had suffered was unimaginable, while the hardship Guode had endured through her “extraordinarily difficult life” were also difficult to comprehend. Mr Manyang was in court on Tuesday.
Guode must serve a minimum 20 years in prison before she is eligible for parole. She is likely to be deported on release.
Justice Lasry imposed a 12-month jail term on the charge of infanticide, which means Guode is the first woman to be jailed on the charge in Victoria. The handful of other women who have previously pleaded guilty to the charge were spared jail.
– Adam Cooper, The Age
