A mother who fell asleep in her hotel room for 13 hours and then woke up to find her 11-day-old baby girl dead next to her on the bed suggested that a high methadone dosage may have been the reason for her deadly slumber. Brenda Newby testifed in the West Australian Coroner’s Court this week that she had against medical advice checked Tamsyn Lee Newby out of hospital on the 26th of January last year, then taken her daily 90ml dose of methadone as well as some tranquillisers. Early the next day she checked into a hotel room.
Tamsyn was found lying face down on the same bed with her face blue, suggesting suffocation, as well as some red marks across her nose and eyes. Coroner Alastair Hope wasn’t able to get an explanation out of Brenda Newby for what he thought could be pressure marks.
Brenda Newby started using heroin when she was 15 and didn’t stop until five months into her pregnancy. When Tamsyn was born her mother checked out of hospital within 24 hours against medical advice. When she was taken back to hospital over a week later, due to Tamsyn having lost 13 per cent of her body weight, she stayed twice as long before, again, checking out against medical advice. While she admitted it was the wrong thing to do at the time she didn’t explain why she would get any better advice at the casino, where she was to meet up with her sister who was after some ecstasy tablets she had.
Her sister Claire, accompanied by a friend, met up with her in her room and hung around for a while, talking and smoking. Later, seeing that mother and child were asleep on the bed, with Tamsyn presumably not propped up properly, they left the room and went down to the casino. She testified that she returned later and tried to get into the room but there was no sound inside. So she went home.
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